I know what you are going say, haven’t I already told you not worry to much about the numbers on your blog. And you are right. But I did not tell you to ignore them all together either. For day 30 of 31-Days to Kick Your Blog in the Butt, we are going to spend some time looking at what analytics metrics you need to know.
You should be spending a lot of time and effort building a successful blog. And you should be striving to bring in clients and/or customers with your blog. Without knowing about web analytics you are not going to know if your efforts are working or not. You need to know this so you can track visitors, referrers and see where all of this comes from.
Today’s discussion
While there are other tools you can use to monitor your numbers, I use and recommend Woopra. And if all of you signed up for Woopra and have it working, you should have some stats by now which you can use to see if your efforts the last 30 days have paid off.
Another tool I just started using in the middle of this series is PostRank Analytics. PostRank provides some interesting stats in connection to what they call “engagements”. Not only do you get stats directly from your site. You also are provided an idea of what is happening with your blog on social networking tools like twitter. The one feature I like is where it actually provides you with tweets for your URL. Sometimes we miss these. And using that one feature, you can see others who are interested in what you are writing about. (Full disclosure cause the FTC tells me so: The link is a coupon code they have provided to me to provide to you. It provides a discounted price.)
It is important to note however that your numbers will become more useful over time. If this is the first time you have considered the numbers, I hope you take something away from it. I will suggest that you look at your blog’s stats on a regular basis. But, let me warn you. Don’t become obsessed. And I was once a new blogger too and I know it is hard not to watch. This is normal behavior, but can lead to a lot of wasted time you could be spending on more important blogging activities. Such as F.L.E.E.
Analytics Metrics You Need to Know
I get asked questions about the following terms and metrics almost daily. And for the most part, people want to know what all of these things are. I hope what we discuss below helps all of you understand the numbers more. One key part of all of this is search engine optimization (SEO). But, there is just not enough time to really dig into the SEO part of all of this. We will save that for the future.
Average Time on Site
The amount of time, on average, a visitor spends on your blog. The majority of your visitors won’t stay very long and may not even be human, so this will seem lower to you than it should (for example, less than two minutes). This can be thrown off by someone who decides to go on vacation while your page is in their browser, and who, upon return, clicks to another page in your blog.
Bounce Rate
Bounce Rate is the percentage of visitors who immediately leave a page upon landing on it. They leave so fast it’s like they “bounce off” the page. You want this as low as possible, especially for search and referral traffic. High bounce rates (over 60%-70% and higher) means your visitors aren’t finding your content relevant or compelling enough to stay for even a moment.
Direct Traffic
Sometimes this is also referred to as “type-in” traffic. These visitors have typed in a URL into their browser’s address bar and are directly visiting your site, rather than reaching your site from clicking a link on another web page. Direct traffic is often the result of your audience having your URL memorized (remarkablogger.com is pretty easy to remember). It can also result from offline advertising methods such as print and television ads.
Keywords
Many analaytics programs and services will also tell you what keywords people were searching on in order to find your blog. I cannot even begin to describe for you how insanely valuable this information is. You get to see the search phrases people use to land on pages in your blog.
New Visits
Often confused with unique visits, new visits are simply visitors who have never been to the site before.
Pages per Visit
The average number of pages sent to visitors during their session for a given time period. For example, the average number of pages visited during a month might be 1.36. I have nothing smart-alecky to say about pages per visit.
Page Views
The number of times web pages are sent to browsers during a given time period. For this metric there is no distinction between single post pages in your blog and “static” blog pages such as your About or Contact page. Advertisers are often concerned about page views because higher page views means more times an ad can be displayed (called an impression, but that’s a different vocabulary lesson), which means a greater likelihood the ad will be clicked. Really bad, confusing web navigation also leads to high amounts of page views, but for the wrong reasons.
Referring Site
A referrer is another domain’s web page the visitor was on before coming to your web page by clicking a link on the previous page.
Returning Visits
The number of tracked visitors who have returned to the site more than once during the reporting period. Having things that don’t work in an email or an RSS reader (like videos or other interactive widgets) will increase returning visits, as will posts in a series where links to the other posts in the series are present. Just telling people to come back doesn’t work so well.
Search Traffic
Search traffic is traffic that arrives through clicking a link in a search engine results page (SERP). If your blog or a post in your blog comes up in a search result, and the searcher clicks the link to your blog, that search engine (who are we kidding, here? We all know it’s Google) has referred traffic to you. In analytics software, such as Google Analytics, it’s possible to see what keywords the visitor was searching on that caused your blog to appear in the results.
Uniques
Unique visits are often confused with new visits, but they are not the same thing. A unique visitor is one person who has visited a site at least once (note that it can be more than once) within a given time period. A new visitor is visiting a site for the first time.
Visits
A visit is simply a session in which a person views pages in a website (well, posts in a blog, in this case). It doesn’t distinguish between new or repeat visits.
Homework or Assignment
Spend some time in the next day or two digging through the metrics we discuss above. See if you notice any traffic patterns. Look to see if there are certain keywords which bring your visitors to your site. And pay attention to the referring sites to see if there are certain blogs sending you a lot of traffic.
