For various reasons, I ended up not taking part in the Stats session at CyberMummy last week, but I thought it might be worth sharing some of the information I put together ahead of the event that I would have shared.
What I wanted to provide was a simple answer for anyone who's ever wondered:
- Why do I need blog stats?
- How do I collect stats?
- How do I make sense of my stats?
- How do I use stats to improve my blog?
I'm by no means an expert in blogging statistics, but over the past year, I have explored and used most of the online stats packages in creating and putting together the Tots100 index. I've tried to be open about different options, while also letting you know which tools and stats I personally find most useful.
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So, why would I need to know my blog stats?
Let's face it - if you only write a blog for fun, for yourself and your family, or as a means of creative expression, you don’t need blog stats. Really. Turn them off; they’ll only make a bad day worse.
If you’re writing for an audience though (and many of us are) then blog stats can help you to understand your audience a little better. And that understanding is key in helping you to progress towards your blogging goals.
I know - blogging goals - sounds a bit pretentious. But what I mean is that the reason I blog might not be the same reason you blog. We all have different motivations for blogging, and that means we want our blogs to achieve slightly different things.
Maybe you just want to grow your audience. Maybe you want your blog to capture the attention of publishers. Maybe you want to promote your skills to potential clients or employers. You might want to make friends through your blog, and develop a more loyal audience that visits your blog regularly.
Using and understanding blog stats can help you to progress towards these goals.
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How NOT to use your blog stats
First, don’t just look at your blog stats and congratulate yourself
when they go up, and drown yourself in wine, tears and self-hatred when
they go down. That way madness lies.
Second, don’t get geekily obsessed with stats and check them on an hourly basis and change your blog content daily in response to what you see. Stats are there to help you achieve what you want to achieve with your blog, and the very best way to do that is to let them settle, and look at trends and overviews. That way you’ll be able to tell the difference between traffic going down because of a seasonal trend, and traffic going down because a specific sort of post wasn’t pulling in readers.
Third, remember that when you have a specific goal in mind, bigger doesn't necessarily mean better. If you are reaching the right people, in the right way, the size of your auience is immaterial. Sure, it's nice to see a graph heading upwards, but never forget that someone might have an audience 10 times larger than yours without successfully reaching their blogging goals.
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How do I collect blog stats?
It’s very simple to collect the information needed to generate blog stats. You need to install a small piece of HTML code into your blog. There are various products that will do this for you, including Sitemeter, Statcounter and Google Analytics.
Depending on the level of detail you need, I suggest starting with Statcounter or Sitemeter. These free tools are very easy to install as widgets on your blog, and provide most of the information you will need. With Sitemeter you can automatically create a customised widget for your blog, which makes it very simple to use - it can be up and running in under 2 minutes. The downside is that the free version will only store 100 or so records – which might mean you need to look at them several times a day as your site gets busier.
Two quick tips: if you’re using a free tool and want to keep stats private, you need to specify this in your account – the default setting makes your stats public. Second, if you are putting this sort of HTML onto your blog ALWAYS place it at the bottom of the right-hand sidebar so it doesn’t slow down the load time of your site.
Google Analytics can store data indefinitely, but be warned – it is far more complex and offers much more sophisticated analysis, and can be intimidating to new users. Approach with caution.
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What will stats tools tell me?
Whichever tool you use, it will record some information about a visitor whenever your blog pages are loaded. This information should include:
Referring URL (a website where someone clicked a link to arrive at your blog. Will be blank if someone typed the address into their browser, rather than clicking a link)
Entry page (the specific page within your blog where the visitor lands)
Exit page (the last page they look at before leaving)
Service provider (the ISP your visitor uses, or their company, if using a dedicated corporate Internet connection)
Summary: Stats tools will also provide summary or dashboard data showing overall patterns of traffic to your blog each day, week or month. When looking at this data you should see things like:
Visits (how many times your blog was visited in a given time period)
Impressions or Page Impressions (how many times pages on your blog were loaded in this time period)
Unique Users (how many individuals are responsible for the total visits over this time period)
Bounce rate (percentage of visitors in this time period who left your blog without clicking anything else)
New visitors (percentage of visitors in this time period who are brand new to your blog)
=How to use blog stats
So, let’s say you want to grow your audience...
First, look at what are the most popular landing pages on your blog, or which is the most popular content (this is very easy to see on Analytics). Knowing which posts work well, and which don’t work so well, can help you to write more of what people like to read.
Next, think about how people are reaching your blog. If you’re posting links on Facebook every day and only getting 1 visitor, but your Tweets are generating 100 visitors, that’s good information. Now you can focus on Twitter, or see how your posts on Facebook might be more inviting. Stats can show you which forums, websites, ads, links and blogrolls are delivering you traffic - and which aren't.
And if you want a specific audience...
Start by looking at keyword stats. If you want to attract people who are looking for organic baby gifts, but most of your keyword traffic comes from a phrase such as “monkey porn” (as is the case with my blog) then that’s good information. You can start thinking about how to use more relevant keywords in the right way – incorporating them into blog titles, category names, tags and headers – and your stats will tell you whether your new keywords are working.
Look too at your bounce rate. When visitors land on your blog using a keyword you think should be working well for you (not monkey porn, probably) do the visitors stick around? In other words, are you meeting their expectations well?
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What other stuff can stats tell me?
Understanding what platform, operating system and browser your visitors use can help you to ensure your content is working for them. If 60% of your blog visitors are using Firefox while you're using IE, that's worth knowing - so you can test your blog in Firefox when you add a new feature or design!
If you want to build a regular audience, the bounce rate is your friend. Try out different techniques to make your site ‘sticky’ and encourage visitors to hang around – picture icons for categories, related post links at the bottom of each post, special categories and clearer navigation – and see how each of those changes impacts your bounce rate. Tweak, test and improve!
If you ever come across online bullies or trolls then stats tools will capture information about them. If you use Statcounter or Sitemeter, it will even capture their specific IP address, which ISPs and police can use to identify the specific user and computer that an attack originates from - so do remember to take a screen shot of the evidence. You can sometimes identify an IP owner yourself, by using a free site to 'reverse engineer' an IP address - this means the website will look up who 'owns' the specified IP). You can also block that specific IP address from commenting on your blog in future.
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What other stats should I know about?
Sitemeter, Statcounter and Google Analytics will give you stats relating to blog traffic and visitors. However, if your blogging goals are slightly different, or change, you might find other tools useful:
PostRank: this is a tool that measures engagement on your blog. Engagement is a posh way of saying ‘conversations’ – so this records how many times people comment on your blog, Tweet about it, or share your content using social bookmarking sites like Digg and Del.ici.ous. It gives each of your posts a score of 1-10 based on how engaging it is, compared to your typical content. (To look at your blog, click on 'top content' then enter your address in the search bar. If your blog isn't yet indexed, searching for it will trigger the site to start indexing it so you should see results next time you visit).
Feedburner: one of the weaknesses of StatCounter etc is they only gather information about people who visit your blog. If people read your blog’s RSS feed in a reader, you won’t know about them. Feedburner is a free way to direct your RSS feed through Google, and then you can access stats about how many people use your feed, how they read it, and what they read.
Alexa/Technorati/Wikio: These sites are all blog search engines, and collect stats on links pointing to your blog. If you aren’t using Google Analytics they can be useful but all have weaknesses. Technorati requires bloggers to register, and this can be a complex process, meaning the directory is rather limited. Alexa measures traffic to blogs and links but has a focus on large US blogs and is very inaccurate when measuring anything with less than 10,000 visits a day. Wikio is simpler to register with, but much less widely known.
Klout: one of a number of free online tools that analyses how you use Twitter, for example by looking at how many people you follow versus how many people follow you; how often your Tweets are replied to or re-Tweeted, how popular the people are who talk to you, and how far your Tweets reach when they are shared. Klout uses a complex algorithm to turn this into a score from 1 to 100. I'm not sure it has any practical use for most bloggers, beyond providing a weird diversion on a quiet afternoon.
Erm ... At this point I planned to stop talking and wait for the bouquets to start landing...
