Getting Started In Blogging: Stats

Posted by Sharon Hurley Hall on May 24th, 2009

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

A key issue to tackle when you start blogging is blog statistics. That will give you a detailed picture of how people are using your blog and what you need to do to improve it. There are several key measures that any good stats or analytics program covers. Let’s look at a few of the most important.

Visitor Analysis

When it comes to visitors, your stats package will tell you how many visitors are coming to your blog each day and what they are looking at. Depending on the package you may be able to break those figures down even more, so that you know which country they came from and how they found your blog (referrers, in stats-speak). It’s important to look not just at the overall visitor numbers, but the unique visitor numbers so that you know both how many individuals visited your blog and how many visited more than once.

Page Analysis

Other important stats are those relating to individual pages. You should be able to tell by looking at your stats which posts got a lot of attention and which were largely ignored. Having a successful blog is a matter of writing more of the first type of post and less of the second. You should also be able to tell how much time people spent looking at your site.

For example, did they follow a link from StumbleUpon, stop by for 30 seconds and exit, or did they find your site via Delicious, and take a couple of minutes to look around? The answer to this will tell you whether your site is sticky enough. Looking at stats relating to entrance and exit pages will help you tweak your blog content to keep more visitors on your site for longer.

Keyword Analysis

A good stats package will also track the keywords that people use to find your site. This is a good way to tell if your search engine optimization efforts are working and if you are ranking for your key term. Getting this aspect right will also help your blog achieve success.

You can find out more about web analytics in our No Frills Guide To Web Analytics, but now it’s time to look at some of the major stats/analytics programs available.

Analytics Programs

There are dozens of analytics programs to choose from, as well as a few options focused mainly on bloggers. In this post, we focus on free web stats packages.

Google Analytics. With the Google name behind it, there’s one thing you never have to worry about - running out of room to store your data. This analytics program is full featured and improvements to the interface have made it much more user friendly. You can find out almost anything about your blog or site with this package. One down side of Google Analytics is that its analysis is always a day behind.

Clicky. Clicky is also full featured and has a wide range of social features that will appeal to bloggers, such as the ability to track Feedburner subscriber numbers and interact with your Twitter account from within the same interface. A killer feature is the Spy view, which lets you see how people are using your blog in real time.

Woopra. This is another comprehensive stats package, which has been in beta and is due for release. It features real time stats so that you can see who is on your site and what they are looking at, as well as automatically tracking repeat visitors.

AwStats/Webalizer. These programs are often provided by your web host and provide a good starting point for understanding visitor behavior on your blog. However, they are not as full featured as other programs and overall visitor numbers may be misleading.

If you can’t decide which one to choose, check out this comparison on the Clazh website.

Sharon Hurley Hall
Get Paid To Write Online.com

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One Response to “Getting Started In Blogging: Stats”

Matt Hayden Says:
June 2nd, 2009 at 7:06 am
Yes, stats are very important. I have used some free statistics systems over the years. The best of them seems to be Statcounter, which gives you heaps of information and 3 free counters. Bravenet also has a good counter. You get three free ones there, too.