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Google Analytics: Metrics Worth Tracking

Seth — Wed, 29 Jul 2009 17:44:18 +0000

Understanding the importance of statistics for your blog is an important step in developing your blog. The best way to find success is by measuring performance and striving to improve it.

Now do not get me wrong, spending hours every day looking at them will not help you. That is too much time spent on numbers and not enough for promoting and writing new content. Those elements are still the most important part of blogging. But learning how to intelligently improve your blog will help you strategically target your next moves towards success.

What Blog Statistics Program Should I Use?

The first thing to understand is that there are differences in statistical analyzation programs. These differences are in source of information and quality of statistics.

The source of information refers to whether the statistics are coming directly from your hosting service, for example Hostgator offers statistics for every blog they host. Another source of statistics is through third party software like Google’s Analytics. Although both sources have their pro’s and con’s we must weigh the options.

Hosting Service Analytics – Using the service your host provides is an easy way to track your statistics and measure your traffic on your blog. For some this information will be difficult to find and once found the numbers might be very confusing in their raw formats. The one significant benefit of hosting analytics programs is the quality of statistics. Although in their raw form, the numbers are most correct directly through the host service.

The reason being that any third party metric tracking system like Google’s Analytics or Sitemeter may lose some of your numbers through the process of extracting data to their third party site. This occurrence is not significant but something to be aware of.

Google Analytics – Now I could put Sitemeter or many other programs in this position but in my opinion Google’s system is the easiest to understand, prettiest to view, and most relevant to my needs.

I recommend Google Analytics for easy tracking, viewing and analyzing all of your blog’s statistics. The process of inputting their code into your blog is simple (matter of fact most themes have a place to put them built in, like Thesis theme) and using the site is very easy.

I personally like the visibility of the statistics. If you can see the numbers in graphs and charts they actually start to mean something to your blog. So let’s get started with learning some of the less known ways to use Google Analytics.

Metrics: Google Analytics

Looking at the Dashboard is the easiest way to see what is happening on your blog. Metrics are divided into 3 major categories: Visitors, Traffic Sources, and Content. The Dashboard provides a very nice line graph, pie chart, map overlay, and some raw numbers to make a quick analysis very easy on a daily basis.

About once a week or every other week you should conduct a more thorough analysis of your blog. Statistics can tell you a lot about your blog. It will show you what is working and what needs improvement. It may also help you manage your time better. So let’s dive in with some specific metrics.

Visitors: Trending

An important function I use when analyzing data for my blogging tips blogs is trending. This just means the general tendency or direction in which your blog is going. You might be interested in that just a little bit.

To use this statistic well focus in on a few less common metrics, Absolute Unique Visitors, Average Pageviews, and Time on Site. The other metrics you are probably familiar with, but these metrics will help you guage your improvent and focus on 2 elements necessary for blogging success. New vistors and depth of visits. Using these statistics you can find how your blog is doing in producing unique views and how long people look at your blog. If the time is short they probably are not really reading your articles.

Visitors: Loyalty

Working with Trending, Loyalty helps you to get a good feel for what your visitors are actually doing. It is important to be open to seeing things the way the visitor does. Otherwise improvements are difficult to make. Using loyalty you can gauge that if the depth of visit is short, 1 pageview, then your navigation needs to increase. Or perhaps the keywords your articles are being found on are not what the reader is expecting.

More Google Metrics

There are dozens of metrics Google offers in their services. Start to explore them and find out what you can learn about your readers and their habits on your blog.

Due to depth this topic needs to be discussed properly, a guide is being produced to follow-up this topic with detailed information about the different metrics. It will explain what the metrics mean and how you can improve your site through using them.

Look forward to this next guide to Google Analytics where we will discuss step by step how to install and use each metric. Using a statistics program to gauge your blog’s success is important to also understanding your blog’s needs. So explore Google Analytics, get to know the statistics, ask questions in the comments, and prepare for an in-depth analysis of each statistical metric on Google Analytics.

Why Numbers Are A Major Blog Killer

Alex — Sat, 30 May 2009 22:12:33 +0000

Numbers have a large impact on our blogs and how we as bloggers interact on it. These numbers I am referring to are any kind of numbers that you see on your blog every day; statistical information basically. How many comments per posts you get, how many comments you have on your blog, number of pageviews, etc. etc are all things we look at and analyze each day.

All of these numbers we have access to can be good for us, or bad.They are good in the terms of helping us see how our blogging strategies are, and how we can build off of them to improve our blog even more. But, having access to all of these numbers and over thinking them can prove to be a bad thing.

I believe that it is easy for looking at something like traffic numbers, or comment numbers to really let you reflect on how good of shape your blog is really in. If you take those two numbers too seriously and let them persuade you enough that they aren’t what you like, you can get yourself into a serious situation.

It’s common for any blogger, especially aged bloggers of about 3-6 months to read through all of those different statistics and judge their blog way too hard. We all like to think that since we have been blogging for a few months now, things should start going our way. It’s not true all the time, but we think it should be. I know I think like that too, but then when I take a look at some of those number statistics, well let’s just say I will be surprised every once in a while!

It’s Easy To Over-Obsess About Every Little Number

In blogging, we seek for perfection, right? Why be the second best when being the first is an option? When that concept is understood, it’s then that any minor mishap on your blog will cause you trouble. Those numbers proving to be the biggest problem of them all.

I’ve talked about obsession before on this blog, and I basically concluded that it’s not worth the troubles. I feel like obsessing over statistics on your blog is completely a bad idea.

Like any other obsession, it will take up your time

When improving a number like comment count or Unique Visitors, you need to spend time both internally and externally for your blog. Externally being promoting your blog on other sites, and internal improvements, the most important kind of improvement.

Spending too much time getting involved with these numbers can actually make them go even lower because of how time consuming and distracting it can be.

Comparing Your Numbers to Other People’s

One thing that can be more stressful to you more than anything else is comparing your blog to another person’s blog. Obviously you won’t have access to all of their information, so you are limited in seeing who is better at what, but a lot of the times you can compare these numbers with other bloggers:

Comments per post
Top commentator counts (if you use the plugin)
Poll votes (if you use the plugin)
RSS Subscribers
Number of received trackbacks
Pages of posts

If you have a rival or something in your niche, I bet that you check up on their blog a lot. When you check them out, I bet you compare some of the things I listed above too. Doing that is where you can either make or break your ego.

Dealing With the Fact Someone is Better Than You

Let’s face it, the chances are that there is someone better than us at what we write about. They get more comments in a post, more trackbacks sent about the post, get talked about more on Twitter, and so on and so forth. It’s a challenge for us to be the better blogger, but it’s something that is rarely done.

When you see someone better than you, it can be annoying. Especially if you have been blogging longer than them. When you see better numbers on another blog and compare them to your own, you should always consider what they have done to get better numbers than you.

How Do You React?

How seriously do you take your numbers on your blog. Have you gotten to the point in your blog where whatever numbers you get a day in any aspect of your blog are just a secondary thing to worry about? Or do you see numbers as a more powerful influence?