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Blog Challenge 30 – 10 Blog Stats I’m Watching

Posted by in 31DBBB, Blogging


This post is part of my ongoing series based upon the eBook 31 Days to Build a Better Blog. To read all of my other posts on the subject, check out the 31DBBB category. For more on the book itself, visit ProBlogger.

I’ve worked in television now for more than twenty years, and it’s hard not to realize the importance of ratings. Ratings measure not only the number of households tuned to your station, but also demographic data like gender and age.

Blogs likewise can track a good deal of information about your readers. Much of that information is available for free to blog owners, depending on your platform. I use Google Analytics, which is free, and I get lots of information to work with. Here, from today’s reading, are the stats I’m paying the most attention to at the moment:

1. Overall Visitors: This is the no-brainer, but it is the simplest measurement to deal with. It’s also a measurement prone to odd occurrences: having your blog featured on someone else’s site can unnaturally inflate that day’s visitor count. That’s always a great thing. But a few days later, when you’re no longer benefitting from that plug, your visitor count drops back to a “normal” number and it’s easy to get disappointed by that. Still, barring anything unforeseen, it’s a good day-to-day measure of how your efforts to draw people in are going. (My overall visits were up 20% over the last year.)

2. Most Popular Posts: This is useful because it gives you a good idea of what kind of topics are getting the most attention. The trick is to balance trying to respond to that kind of feedback and altering your blog’s focus.

3. Referrals: I’ve made no secret about the fact that my weekend memes, the Saturday Six and Sunday Seven, bring a lot of visitors to my blog. They bring many more visitors here than actually leave comments, which leads me to believe that people are either playing elsewhere without leaving a link, or that they’re just curious to see what people are talking about and may be looking for topics to write about at their own blogs. But early on, as I embarked on this journey to improve the blog, people suggested that I move should consider either ditching those memes or moving them to another blog. Considering the number of people they bring in percentage-wise, I just couldn’t agree that this would be a good idea. Had I not been aware of my referral stats, I might have been tempted to move them elsewhere, which could have been a bad move.

4. Keywords: Like most popular post information, a list of the keywords that brought people to your blog could lead you astray if you focus too much on trying to write to those posts. For example, I wrote a post years ago about getting someone else’s mail and stamping “Addressee Unknown” Those keywords remain popular, which means that people searching for that topic are brought here. I wrote a follow-up post about one reason simply writing those two words on an envelope might not be enough to stop that mail from returning to you. That was a good way to capitalize on the keyword search. But I didn’t turn this into a blog about dealing with mail; that would have been overkill.

5. Daily Trends: My biggest days, in terms of visits, are Saturday and Sunday. That’s no surprise, considering that my top referer is a directory of memes that point to the memes I do on those two days. Generally, week to week, my weakest day tends to be Thursday. I’m not sure why that is the case; I usually have something posted on Thursdays. But for whatever reason, that day tends to experience a lull. So I’m trying to work up an idea for something on Thursday that might boost readership on that day.

6. Bounce Rate: This is a stat that a lot of bloggers aren’t that familiar with. But it can be a good measurement of how enticing your blog is. The bounce rate is the rate at which people bounce off of your blog from the initial page that they landed on. In other words, if someone comes to your blog’s front page and then leaves your blog without going any deeper into your site, your bounce rate is high. That’s bad. If someone comes to your site and explores a bit, your bounce rate is low. That’s good. (My bounce rate actually increased over the past year by 14%. That tells me I need to do a better job of crafting teases as excerpts in place of just relying on the first few lines of the post to do that job for me.)

7. Time On Site: The time an average visitor spends on your site is also important. The more one spends, the more engaged he is. You want a higher amount of time. (My time spent stat is also down a bit over the past year, so that’s an area for improvement.)

8. New vs. Returning Visitors: This is a good stat to take a glance at once in a while because it gives you an idea of whether you’re converting new visitors into loyal readers. You always want new visitors, because that’s the only way you can grow your blog. But you also want to see your returning visitors growing, because this means they liked what they saw enough to come back for more. (My new visitors increased by less than a percentage point, which means that I at least maintained a loyal audience over the past year. Short of adding to, maintaining it is the best result you could hope for!)

9. Top Exit Pages: This stat is useful for two reasons: if there’s a particular page that’s causing an unusually high number of exits, meaning that it’s the last page a reader views before leaving your blog, there could be a problem with that page; otherwise, it could indicate that someone came to your blog and found what they were looking for on that particular page. (A high-ranking exit page for this blog last year was the story about Nordstrom fighting “Christmas Creep.” That story really spiked going into the holiday season, but the high exit on that page indicates that people came specifically for that story. My challenge, then, is to find ways to take stories like that and find ways to lure readers deeper into the blog: related posts about that topic, for instance, or follow-up posts about other stores that are similarly resisting the temptation to put up Christmas displays prior to Halloween!)

10. Click Hotspots: Where do people actually click on your blog? That’s a question that CrazyEgg.com can show you with a color-coded “heat map,” which graphically depicts exactly where visitors are clicking. I’ll post more about this in a future post, but it can be very useful, particularly if you’re trying to look for ways to improve the layout of your blog, or to verify that your readers understand how to navigate from your front page. CrazyEgg.com is a paid service, but the first month is a 30-day free trial. Yes, I cancelled after 30 days, because I got the information I needed. I’d consider paying short-term if I was to change the layout, but I’m much less likely to pay now that I have the information I wanted.

Your Turn:
Do you pay attention to your stats? If so, which ones do you find most important?