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.

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