It’s OK To Be A StatsAHolic

Bloggers are often teased about their incessant need to view their blog stats. Sure, we may need to stroke our blog egos once in a while, but if you find that you just can’t get enough of stats, don’t despair. You may not know that there are good reasons to be a stats junkie. The next time you’re accused of merely feeding your vanity when you check your stats, you’ll be able to counter-argue with the good reasons you read about here.

Stats give you a wealth of data to mine, including vital information to help you decide what is working well and what isn’t. With the right set of stats, you can see the progression that a user makes as he travels around your blog. If your users are confused by the navigation, stats may help you determine that and solve the problem. If your users consistently search for something they can’t find, you will know to make that clearer to them.

Stats can help you measure the effectiveness of a call to action, such as showing you how many times a file was downloaded. And of course, stats can show you minute details about who your users are and where they are coming from. This is vital information to have if you hope to reach a target audience.

While there are lots of good reasons to check your stats, gaining more traffic from search engines is one of the very best. Mining known site data is one of the best ways to manage your SEO campaign. If you can get a feel for what types of phrases visitors are searching for, you can give them more of what they want. For example, let’s say that your stats make it clear that a large majority of your users are getting to your site because they searched for variation of the phrase [download free blidgets]. Quite possibly, you mentioned that phrase once in a post, but didn’t elaborate on it. If so, your visitors are probably disappointed when they don’t find any blidgets to download on your site. So, what can you do? Give them what they came for, of course! By providing them with exactly what they were searching for, you are creating loyalty, and will likely receive more traffic via word of mouth and social networking. Without stats, however, you may never have known that your users were looking for free blidgets to download.

By the way, if you were wondering which stats package I would recommend, I’d have to go with pMetrics from Performancing. The details they provide are great, but the visual format is clear and understandable. They offer both free and premium packages, and you can try the premium package for free for 3 weeks to see if it’s right for you.

So I say it’s ok to be a statsaholic. The next time someone calls you on your need to check stats, let them know that you’ve got really great reasons for doing so!