I’ve had Google Analytics set up on my main website for as long as I can remember. I check it relatively often so I can keep track of where my visitors are coming from and which posts and pages they are most interested in.

For a good few years now, my most visited page (other than the home page) is a post I wrote years back on How To Write A Business Book: The Ultimate Guide.

Anyway, main website aside, I also have Google Analytics set up for my Beehiiv site, Ghost site, and both my Substacks (even though all three platforms have built-in analytics).

If you don’t have Google Analytics set up on your website, I highly recommend doing it.

Knowing where your website visitors are coming from and which pages they are spending the most time on can really help you refine your marketing strategy.

Setting up Analytics is relatively straightforward. Here’s a guide from Google (or if you’re mates with a web designer, ask them how to do it):

Once you have set up your Analytics, you can see how many visitors you are getting and where they come from.

Getting visitors is all well and good, but there’s not much point getting hundreds of visitors if they are leaving without taking any action.

The same applies to getting email subscribers. Building a big list is only useful if the people on it read your emails.

That’s why it’s important not to get hung up on the wrong things.

Of course, I want to grow all my publications, but I’m also motivated by the fact that my average open rate is over 50% for all four publications, and my unsubscribe rates are low.

Here are my stats for this newsletter, showing an unsubscribe rate of 0.75% and no reports of spam.

That means 99% of people who sign up for my emails are hanging around. Nobody is signing up and then unsubscribing because my emails weren’t what they thought they would be. And all of my subscribers are genuine sign-ups. I’m not scraping data and then adding people to my list so I can spam them or inflate my numbers.

The most important metrics for you will depend on what your goals are, but there are a few things it’s worth keeping track of.

Email

If you are trying to build an email list, then subscriber numbers are important. But not just the number itself - where are the subscribers coming from?

Another metric you should pay attention to is open rates. You might have the odd dip you can’t explain, but you might also notice that emails about some subjects get higher open rates than others.

And you should also pay attention to unsubscribe rates. Having a certain level of attrition is good. You want people to unsubscribe once they’ve lost interest (or when it’s clear they are never going to buy from you).

But if you’re consistently losing people after the first or second email, you might have a content problem.

Blog

Again, you want to know where your readers come from, but also which topics attract the most readers.

Depending on the type of business you run, you might also be interested in which countries the most visitors come from or how many visitors are returning visitors. If you sell products through your site, you can set Analytics to track funnels so you can see exactly where you are losing people.

Whatever metrics you follow, don’t just look at the numbers and do nothing with the information. Expect the odd anomaly, but if you're seeing patterns in the data, you need to figure out what those patterns are telling you and what you need to do to improve results or build on success.

I checked my analytics earlier this week, and I noticed I’d had a visitor to The Freelance Fairytale who came through ChatGPT

I know one visitor isn’t anything to get overexcited about, but it is interesting (because, hopefully, there will be more).

A few weeks ago, I read a post by someone explaining how she was “training” AI on her services. It got me wondering what AI knew about me, so I asked ChatGPT a few questions about my book, The Freelance Fairytale.

The info it gave me wasn’t correct, so I started feeding it more information. I then steered the “conversation” to my newsletter, blog and services.

I didn’t really believe it would help, but you never know. And even if it had no influence on ChatGPT in the wider world, it was interesting to see the responses. If you’re interested, here are the screenshots of the conversation:

I particularly like the final response:

Anyway, let’s get back to the subject of analytics.

When I saw the ChatGPT referral on my analytics, I thought maybe my interaction with ChatGPT had helped. But then yesterday, one appeared for my Beehiiv site too. Interesting.

You can’t see what people asked ChatGPT to get referred or which page they were sent to, so there’s not much I can do with the data. But it does mean that the AI-enthusiasts probably have a point about how more and more people are replacing ‘traditional’ search engines with AI tools.

Although this is interesting, it doesn’t necessarily mean you need to suddenly change your blog or SEO strategy. From what I understand, search engines and AI tools will still favour high-quality content, so as long as that’s what you’re sharing, you don’t need to worry (at least not just yet).

So what do my analytics tell me?

Well, according to Google Analytics, most of my website traffic is direct, which makes sense as I share a lot of direct links.

Outside of this, it’s pretty evenly spread between search engines (Google and Bing) and social media (LinkedIn and Facebook), with a few visitors coming from other places (Medium, ChatGPT, and so on).

According to the in-platform analytics, email open rates are fairly consistent across all my newsletters.

With this publication, the emails with the highest open rates tend to be the ones about Substack.

This correlates with Google Analytics, which shows my most visited page is the ‘Beehiiv V Substack V Ghost: Feature Comparison’ post, with ‘How to set up Substack’ not far behind. Interestingly, the Susbtack post is my most viewed post on Medium (aside from the two that were boosted), and the comparison is the second most viewed.

I’m not entirely surprised by this. Going into the experiment, I knew Susbtack was a more well-known platform, and it’s definitely the one I see people asking about the most. I will create additional posts about Susbtack to attract more visitors to my website, but I’m not going to focus all my email content on it. The open rates aren’t wildly different between topics, which suggests subscribers like a mix.

All in all, there doesn’t seem to be any of my content that is completely bombing on any platform, which is good. It means I’m generally writing stuff that my audience likes, and that is the whole point of content marketing. You want to create content that your ideal audience is actually interested in.

So I might make a few tweaks, and I’ll certainly be keeping my eye on the data, but I’m not going to make any drastic changes for now.

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