What is Google Analytics?

How Does Google Analytics Work?

Google Analytics tracks all sorts of interesting data with regard to traffic on your pages, such as visitor trending and loyalty, browser capabilities, network properties, and mobile stats. It allows you to view traffic sources, as well as benchmark your performance and even looks at the density of visitors via a map overlay. In short, while Google Analytics doesn't help you directly earn money like other affiliates listed under Affiliate Settings, it does help you track and improve your performance, leading to better Hubbing, and, if you're after it, higher earnings!

Google Webmaster Tools

Once you have your Google Analytics set up, you can collect even more data on your Hubs by linking your Analytics account to Google's Webmaster Tools. Check out our Hub on how to do this!

Signing Up for Google Analytics

If you have a Google Account, simply sign up for an analytics account and then enter the UA- code they assign you on your HubPages Affiliate Settings page. For more detailed instructions, visit our guide on setting up Google Analytics.

What Does Google Analytics Offer?

Inside your Google Analytics account, you will be able to see different stats such as the following:

• The Content Overview section will show you a list of all of your Hubs with the number of page views and percent of page views for that Hub. If you have a large number of Hubs, you can click the View Report link for a full listing.
• Graphs that display the number of visitors you've experienced within a specifed timed frame.
• A Map Overlay showing where in the world your visitors are coming from, with the darker, highlighted areas showing where most of the visitors are from. You can click "View Report" for more details.
• The Traffic Source Overview shows how much traffic you have recieved from different search engines, referring websites, direct traffic, and other sources. You can click the 'View Report' link for more details about your traffic sources.

This analytics information can get as detailed as you'd ever want to get and can be a very valuable way to get a even better sense of what your Hubs are up to and what types of traffic they're getting. By using some of the information that Google Analytics shows, you can continually improve your method for publishing Hubs, so don't just look at it, learn from it!