Google Analytics: back to the basics

Since I started writing mirincon.co in 2008, not always I did the right things. It took me a couple of years to learn how to create hight quality content, to know how often should I post or how to write SEO-friendly posts. This happened because nobody taught me how to run a blog. I learned by doing and seeing what others were doing. I’ve read books and tons of blogs and during the process I’ve learned. Nevertheless, there’s a lot I don’t know yet as well. And this is what happened to me recently with Google Analytics.

Google Analytics is an extremely useful tool I didn’t use for ages, and when I started using it I learned it from the scratch. This happened back in 2013. I used to work at an SEO agency, and one of the first things I realized was that my blog didn’t event have a Google Analytics code installed. Man, that’s like 5 years of lost data!

Once I learned that lesson, I installed Google Analytics. By doing this, I would have the chance of tracking how users were using and finding my blog.

In case you don’t know, Google Analytics is a technology anyone with access to the HTML code of a website can install. You just need a Google Account and set up separately a Google Analytics account. After setting up your account, you will have a Javascript Google Analytics Tracking Code (GATC) that will look like the one below. This code will be able to recognize some events when a user loads a page. For example, this code may identify the time that a user passed in a single page before leaving our website or before visiting a new page, and there are tons of events and useful information Google Analytics will provide us about our users.

Continue reading

Domain registration: first steps

Hello, World! This is the first post of my brand new personal website, using my own domain danielafanador.co. As you may know, I already have my personal blog www.mirincon.co (in Spanish) in which I write in a weekly basis some thoughts about tech, education, economy, media, startups, among other things. The objective of this new website/blog is not to write opinions like the former one, but to post in a non-weekly basis about technical stuff I use in my daily work and personal projects. Just in case, I’ve worked with technology, advertising and Internet for more than 5 years and I started writing mirincon.co in 2008.

Now that you know what to expect, I want to talk in this first post about something I had to actually do to setup this website. So, if you are planning to create your own website or blog, be sure to read until the end of this post. Questions and comments are very welcome! Continue reading