Image by Van Johnson Photography

This post has been submitted by Sharon Hurley Hall from Get Paid To Write Online.com.

As a blogger, chances are that you have a favorite analytics program. Google Analytics is one of the best known, but there are many others, including Clicky and Woopra. I don’t know about you, but when I started using Google Analytics, I had very little idea what the different metrics (a fancy word for types of analysis that you can measure and quantify) meant. If you are wondering where to start and how to use the information in your analytics program, here’s a no-frills guide to what it all means. I’ll use Google Analytics as a case study, as most analytics programs have similar information.

Visitors

As the name suggests, visitors tells you how many people visited your site. Most analytics programs offer overall visitor numbers, as well as unique visitors. In other words, if I visit your site twice this month, I will count twice in the visitor numbers but only once in the unique visitor numbers. You may also be able to find out the number of new vs returning visitors, which will help you to gauge visitor loyalty - or whether your site is attracting people back for a second, third or fourth look. You can get information about the languages your visitors speak, the countries they come from, the type of internet connection they use, whether they have Flash, and their browser and screen resolution. All of this can be useful in deciding on the amount of multimedia content and the size of images for your blog.

It is important to monitor pageviews and average pageviews. This tells you how many pages most visitors are looking at on your site or blog. If it’s less than one, then you need to think seriously about making your site stickier. If it’s a couple of pages or several, then it’s a sure sign that you are doing something right. Similarly, if your visitors’ average time on site is a couple of minutes, that’s a good sign, as many people leave a site within 30 seconds if they don’t like it. That can contribute to a high bounce rate.

Traffic Sources

There are several important metrics under the heading of traffic sources. Direct traffic is traffic that comes straight to your site. In other words, someone typed in the URL or followed a bookmark to get there. It’s good to have some direct traffic because these are people who already like your blog and your brand.

When people come to your site via another site, these figures appear under referring sites. Referring sites might include places where you guest blogged, sites where your content was reviewed, social media profiles, social bookmarking sites and the like. Some analytics programs (such as Clicky) separate social media links from other links.

And, of course, some of your traffic will come from search engines, which means people found your site when entering a search query. That leads to the other important metric, which is keywords. These are the search terms that people use to find your blog. With any luck, they are also the terms in your content, so that you will rank highly for relevancy. For example, on my writing site, most of the people who find my site through the search engine are looking for ways to get paid to write, create a writing portfolio or get paid online. Analytics users with AdWords accounts can also access metrics relating to ad campaigns under traffic sources.

Content

For many bloggers, the metrics relating to content are the most important. These make it easy to tell what people who visit your blog have found most appealing. To get started, look at top content (which gives you the URL visited) and content by title (which can help you see which titles are effective). The content drilldown dashboard lets you click on each link for statistics for that page. Landing pages and exit pages are also important, as you can see which pages brought visitors flocking to your site and which made them leave in a hurry.

If your analytics program allows it, looking into the navigation summary shows how visitors interacted with your site, including where they were before they arrived at a particular page and where they went when they left it. All of the other metrics are available for each content page. You may also have access to click patterns for your site, which can show you how your site works. Are people clicking on your ads? Do they visit the blogs on your blogroll?

Other Features

Some analytics programs also offer goals and campaigns. Goals are URLs that you want visitors to get to after completing an action, such as signing up for your newsletter. Campaigns (according to Clicky) are ads for your site run in other places. Goals and campaigns can be used together to track the start and end points of a desired action.

Summary

All of these metrics are invaluable in helping you to tweak the layout and content of your blog. For example, you could:

• write a new post around keywords that are generating traffic
• change ad positions to keep visitors interested
• reduce image sizes if all of your visitors use dial-up

These are just a few examples. How are you using analytics data for your blog?

Sharon Hurley Hall
Get Paid To Write Online.com
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