5 Things I Learned From My Stats
Behind every great blogger is great stat analyzer. My tool of choice is Performancing Metrics, but I also like Google Analytics and Site Meter. By analyzing my stats I’m able to learn more about the people who visit my blog and further reach out to my audience. Here’s how my stats help me:
Search Terms: What are the search terms people are using to get to your blog? Some of them are rather obvious, for instance, “Freelance Writing Jobs” is the number keyword phrase for traffic at my blog Freelance Writing Jobs. Others such as “Summer Jobs for Teachers” aren’t so obvious. Now that I know teachers are using my blog to help find work during their summer holidays, I can include writing jobs for teachers and write articles of interest.
Top Referrers: My stats tell me where my traffic comes from. Right now, the bulk of my referring traffic comes from Google and Stumble Upon with RSS feeds coming in third. I also receive a good chunk of traffic from other writing and blogging blogs. Knowing who is sending traffic my way allows me to reciprocate the link love and also find out who is stealing my content. I also know what methods people are using to find my blogs and get ideas for new material by visiting the referring links.
Most Popular Days & Times: Through my statistics I know Mondays are my most popular days. I also know I receive many visitors during lunch hours and in the evening. This tells me I should post links to jobs before noon so those of my readers who work can check out the listings on their lunch hours, with a good discussion post for the afternoon. It also tells me to post my strongest content on Monday.
Top Content: My stats also tell what pieces of writing my readers enjoy the most and least. Knowing my audience means I can write the type of content that will keep them interested.
Actions: I like to know what my readers are doing when they visit my blog. Do they stick around and check out several different pages or do they land on a page and immediately exit? When they do stay, what catches the eye? Do they like to comment? Are they visiting the blogs I link to? Through my stat analyzer, I learned the average reader performs at least five actions when visiting my blog. Not too shabby.
There are so many things you can learn from taking some time each week to analyze your statistics. I compare it to seeing into the minds of your readers and tailoring your blog to their needs. The next time you log on to check your stats, don’t just look at the amount of people who visit and the site referrers. Take a good long look at all categories, what you find might surprise you.
Written by Deborah Ng from Freelance Writing JobsPosted on December 16th, 2007 and filed under Blogging, Search Engine Optimisation
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May I add another example… this isn’t directly related to your blogging techniques, but to your commenting technique.
Visitors from Comments: It’s really important to see where a lot of your visitors are coming from other blogs where you commented. In some websites where there is an increadible number of traffic and your being really informative, you may not even get a couple of visitors from there. On the other hand, if you post to a smaller blog with more like a community status, you could get the whole community visiting you. All this information is found in your statistics and it’s good to keep track and write down about which blogs are good to comment for traffic or not.
That’s right, sometimes you think traffic is coming from a link from a blogger’s post when really it’s someone who followed your comment link.
These are all great tips for what to look for in analytics. I think the fact that analytics shows SO MUCH data, many people can get intimidated. Thank you for breaking this down so nicely.