How to Analyze Traffic Spikes With Google Analytics


This video gives two ways to analyze your traffic spikes with Google Analytics.

Rough Transcript

Hi, welcome to Tubetorial. This is Dee Barizo.

In this episode, we’re going to look at how to analyze traffic spikes with Google Analytics.

Here we’re at Google Analytics. I see a small traffic spike right here, so let’s find out what’s causing this spike.

First, you want to get the date when the spike happened. So, I’ll mouse over and you’ll see that it was on April 13. Then, go to the date range section and make the date range to only include April 13. You can do that by clicking the date and then the “Apply” button.

So, now we can see the stats for April 13.

Scroll down to the Traffic Source Overview section. I can tell that the spike came from the search engines because my numbers for Referring Sites and Direct Traffic are low.

To analyze the search traffic, click on “view report”. Then, scroll down and look at the keyword section. The keyword section shows your top keywords based on traffic.

I can tell that the spike was mostly caused by the top two keywords sice they have much more traffic than the other keywords.

Also, both of the top keywords are related. They both have the words “alara reborn”. This blog is in the gaming industry and Alara Reborn is one of the new products coming out. It looks like buzz is growing for this product.

To find out which of my pages is attracting people searching for those keywords, click on “Content” and then “Top Landing Pages”.

As you can see, here is my blog post that is getting all the traffic. You can click here to see the post.

To use this information to get more traffic, I can write more posts related to Alara Reborn.

Here’s another example. This is a different site. It’s an online dress store I run with my sister.

As you can see, there was a pretty big traffic spike back in February. So, let’s do the steps again.

I check out the date of the spike. It’s February 23 and then I’ll change the date range. And then we’ll go to Traffic Sources Overview. And this time, it’s not the search engines sending all the traffic. It’s a referring site.

Let’s click “view report” and then look at Sources. And we can see that the bulk of the traffic is coming from College Candy, a popular college blog.

Again to find out, the page or pages that’s getting the traffic, click on “Content” and then “Top Landing Pages”.

It looks like College Candy liked one of our posts.

How I can use this information to get more traffic? Here are several ways. I can offer guest posts on College Candy and other similar blogs. I can promote the blog post to other college blogs. Also, I can create similar blog posts and pitch it to College Candy and other college blogs.


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10 Comments

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  1. Thanks for the tutorial! My search results in Google have been so crazy lately that it’s hard to tell exactly what’s going on.

  2. Google Analytics is an awesome tool. By using this we can track all the things which is happening with our blogs.

  3. I could spend hours in Analytics… They have just added a Site Speed report for all sites too (previously you had to add code script to your pages to get it)

  4. Simple and nice tutorial.

    My favourite thing is “Visitors Flow” – it is Superb!

    Helmuts

    p.s. really nice traffic stats 🙂