Toolbox Saturday: The Google Analytics Mobile App

Google Analytics has always been one of my go-to tools for maintaining and growing my blog. What I’ve always liked about it is that I can quickly easily get key information about what’s happening with my blog’s traffic at any moment.

And that level of convenience has been taken to the next level with the Google Analytics Mobile App. Thanks to this app, I’ve now got that information right with me on my phone. And these days, I have my phone with me almost every every waking moment, whereas I’m often away from my laptop for hours at a time. I also have the WordPress mobile app on my phone and with Jetpack enabled it also gives me some basic traffic information and between the two apps I can pretty much tell what’s happening with my blog traffic in a few seconds. Which is just what I need.

Here’s a couple of screenshots of the basic traffic information that’s available to me when I open the app:

This is the information I look at the most. I want to see how many people are online right now, and what traffic is looking like so far today. Whenever I track traffic, I always track it hourly, versus the same day a week ago. This gives me a useful way to see how traffic is doing today versus the same day a week ago. Basically, I’m looking for spikes up or down.  If traffic is way off, I want to know why.  If it’s way down, was there a connection issue or was the site down?  If it’s way up, was there a post that was getting shared a lot, or was I getting some spam traffic?

Here’s another graph found as soon as I open the app, a sort of ‘heat map’ of how traffic did throughout the day:

I like the way the traffic levels are represented as colors, that helps me easily understand what times of the day had the most traffic, and which ones had the least. This can help me adjust when I promote content and when I publish new content.

Overall, I really like having this information available to me at a glance and right as soon as I open the app. Now the one thing I wish was available as soon as I open the app would be a list of the most viewed posts for that day. I get that with the WordPress app, but it would be nice to have that with the Google Analytics app all in the same place. There’s probably a very easy way to add that report that I simply can’t figure out.

You’re probably already using Google Analytics to track your blog’s traffic, so why not grab the mobile app as well?