When do people visit my site? :: A Google Analytics Tutorial

Knowing how many people are visiting your site is great but knowing WHEN people are visiting your site is just as important. Knowing when people typically visit your site allows you to add new content when visits are at their highest levels so that the new content has a greater chance of being viewed.

Today we're going to tackle an age old question that dates back to the middle of the Paleozoic era (OK, maybe I exaggerated a bit). Today's question is: When are people visiting my site?

GA will help us answer this question. No, not the Peach State. Not Great Adventure either. The other GA: Google Analytics. This tutorial is based on the assumptions that you currently have a website, have Google Analytics installed, and have a very basic understanding of Google Analytics.

If you have never heard of Google Analytics (GA) before, GA is a powerful tool that allows people to analyze traffic to their website (and it's FREE). It provides users with a wealth of information and can help you answer questions such as:

• How many people are visiting my site?
• How do people get to my site?
• How much time do people spend on my site?
• What content do people look at while on my site?
• When do people visit my site?

Today we are going to take a look at the last question: When do people visit my site?

Account Overview

For the purposes of today's tutorial we will be taking a look at the analytics info for our Famous Senior of the Day Tumblr Blog; other site profiles will be blurred to protect the innocent ;)

When we log in to GA we arrive at our account overview page (just click on thumbnails for larger images):

While we're here on the overview page let's take a quick look at what's going on. The overview page gives us a quick breakdown where we can see:

• Number of visits our site has received
• Average amount of time viewers spend on our site
• Bounce rate (lower the better)
• Completed goals
• % change in visits (Tip: this can be changed via the drop down menu).

Looking at the top right hand corner of the screen we can see that these numbers are for a 1 month period (Tip: the period can be changed by toggling the buttons below the range).

Let's click view report to get some more information.

Dashboard

When we click on view report we are brought to the Dashboard screen:

The Dashboard gives us the same info we saw on the Overview page along with a graph (Tip: the graphed variable can be changed via the drop down menu). We can also see some new information towards the bottom of the screen including:

• Visitors overview
• Map overlay
• Traffic sources overview
• Content overview

These sections will allow us to answer questions such as:

• What areas of the world are people viewing my site from?
• What other sites are referring people to my site?
• What are people looking at on my site?
• When do people visit my site?

We want to find out when people are visiting our site so let's click on visits.

Visits

When we click on visits we are brought to the All Visitors Visits screen:



The default view for the Visits page is Visits / Day. This is great information for sites that feature certain content on specific days of the week such as a blog that may have a featured artist every Monday. You can easily scroll down your Visits page and see if you receive more traffic on certain days of the week (Hint: You can even compare your traffic from this Monday to last Monday using the Compare to Past feature in the date range drop down menu).

We now have an idea of what days our visitors like to come to our site but how about what time of day they like to visit? Let's click on the Hour button (clock icon right below the date range at the top right of the screen) to get that info.



We can now see what time of day people are visiting our site. It looks like our Famous Senior of the Day blog gets roughly 1/3 of its views during the hours of 3am-6am est. The graph shows us that our content has the best chance of being seen during our early morning hours which makes sense since roughly half of Tumblr users, and most of our blog followers, are located outside the United States.

Recap

To sum things up we can quickly ascertain when people are visiting our site by logging in to our GA account. Once logged in click view report > dashboard > visits > graph by hour

We now know when people are visiting our site and as some wise men once said, knowing is half the battle ;)

We hope this helped out a bit. If you have any GA related questions or any GA topics you would like to see covered in a tutorial please leave us a comment below and we'll see if we can help out ;)

One Fix Two Fix, Red Fix Blue Fix :: A Picasa Tutorial

Well, they say a picture is worth a thousand words. Unfortunately, sometimes our pictures don't say the words we would like them to ;) Even with autofocus, autocolor, and various other automatic settings selected, it's still possible to snap a picture that's not really what we were looking for. Often times we don't realize this until we upload our photos to our computer; ask us how we know that one ;)

In this tutorial we're going to take a quick look at how to touch up a photo with Picasa free photo editing software from Google. If you would like to follow along but don't have Picasa feel free to download it here.

If you have just downloaded Picasa (this was our first time using it as well), when you open it for the first time it will do a quick scan of your computer to find pictures you already have. This may take a few minutes depending on how many pictures you have stored on your computer.

Choose Photo

After Picasa has loaded all of your images choose a file that you would like to work with, or you can use ours (just right click save). We decided to go with a picture of our Dr. Seuss print; despite the fact that we were using a good digital camera with autosettings selected the picture came out crooked and dark. We will walk through how we fix this step by step. Just click on the pictures as we go to make them bigger ;)



Open Photo

If this is your first time in Picasa just double click the file you would like to work with to open it. Once the file is open you will see a few things. On the left side you will see your basic editing controls where we can make basic fixes, more specific tuning, and add effects. On the bottom of the window you will see print, export, email options as well as a pretty cool blog this feature.

You will notice that our photo is a bit on the dark side and it's crooked.



The first thing we want to do is straighten the good doctor out. We clicked on the straighten tool on the basic fixes tab and this brings up a slider to adjust our image.



Use the slider below the photo to adjust it until it is straight, or as close to straight as you want it to be :) After some quick tweeking our photo is now straight:



We now want to take a look at adjusting the color. We think adjusting color boils down to personal preference; some people like their images to be highly saturated with very bright colors while others prefer softer looks or even black and white. Picasa offers a lot of color options so experiment a bit, have some fun, and see which settings you like best.

We are going to go with the feeling lucky settings to get things rolling. Just click the feeling lucky tool on the basic fixes tab and Picasa will make some changes. If you don't like the changes just click the Undo I'm Feeling Lucky button on the left. The feeling lucky changes look like a step in the right direction so we're gonna keep them and further tweek the colors with the Tuning options (the middle tab on the left).



We are making the following adjustments to the Fill Light (25%), Highlights (10%), and Shadows (20%) sliders. These are rough values that we used but feel free to use which ever values you like. These adjustments darkened up the blacks and made the colors in the print pop a little more:



Now let's see what the effects tab has to offer. The effects tab contains a bunch of great effects that are all as simple as the click of a button. We're going with the focal black and white effect which turns the image black and white except for a focal point which remains in color. This effect really softened up the background of our photo further emphasizing our print:



The photo is definitely moving in the right direction but we want to bump the colors up just a little bit. To make the colors brighter we're going to use the saturation tool on the effects tab, we used a setting of about 10% but again play with the settings to find what you like.



At this point things are looking pretty good so time to start wrapping things up. The first thing to do is crop your image. We're using the manual crop tool on the basic fixes tab.



Cropping allows you to center your image or remove any unwanted parts of the image background. After cropping our image this is what we are left with:



Lastly we want to save our file (we typically save throughout the entire creating/editing process) and add some tags. Since Picasa is a photo organizer as well as a photo editor if we add tags at this point we can then search for them and make albums of items with similar tags later on. Tagging at this point is probably a good idea if you plan on uploading your images to the web too.



A quick before and after just to recap:



Now using the image we just created we can make a brightly colored Dr. Seuss polaroid:



We hope you enjoyed this tutorial and that it was somewhat helpful. If you have any questions just let us know in the comments section and we will be sure to get back to you. We are currently working on a tutorial to remove an image's background using Gimp. If there's anything else you would like to see covered just leave a comment and we'll see if we can make it happen. Have a senioritis day!