Blog statistics for business — What to monitor and why
If you’re blogging for business, monitoring and analyzing your blog stats must become part of your blogging routine. Personally I use three primary tools to measure the effectiveness of my blog. I monitor my blog traffic with Google Analytics, review the least utilized, most promising keywords with HitTail, and use FeedBurner Pro to analyze my blog’s feed.
Why blog statistics are important for business bloggers
There are numerous reasons that one of your regular blog-related activities should be reviewing your blog statistics. Here are four of the most important.
- Your blog statistics keep you focused. Unlike personal blogging, knowing your blogging goals and whether or not you’re reaching them is vital to your success. Looking at your statistics, you will know if you have achieved your goals, are making progress, or are off-track.
- Blog statistics help you plan effectively. By knowing how people are coming to your site, what they’re reading, and what actions they’re taking, you can make more thoughtful choices about such things as where to advertise, with whom you want to collaborate or exchange links, and which posts to highlight.
- Statistics can help you earn money (and save it too). By knowing your number of visitors and feed subscribers, you can ask to be compensated fairly for advertising you run on your site or feed. If you know you’re already drawing a lot of traffic from search engines for certain keywords then you can skip or eliminate the pay-per-click advertising.
- Blog stats can wake you up. Whether you’ve underestimated the value of your blog or have gotten complacent about adding value, knowing your statistics will give you a snapshot of reality.
Which blog statistics matter most?
As with almost any blog-related discussion, my answer to this question is “It depends.” Here are a few pieces of advice I can offer.
- Your blogging goals should determine which statistics you track/monitor. For example, if one of your goals is to turn one-time visitors into regular readers, you’ll want to look at your “% new visits” statistics in Google Analytics or your “subscribers” totals in FeedBurner.
- You might monitor the same stats all the time or you might analyze certain stats only for specific purposes. For instance, when I was preparing for a redesign of MyBlogCoach, I looked at what Google Analytics could tell me about what browser use and screen resolutions were most common among my visitors. I then optimized my site for those people, knowing that they made up the majority of my traffic.
- Make certain that you use whatever statistics you track. Though plugins and simple javascript can make tracking statistics a simple process, if you’re not going to use the stats don’t waste your time setting them up. Make the process as simple as possible even if that means you track only one thing. Just track and analyze it consistently.
“He uses statistics as a drunken man uses lampposts - for support rather than for illumination.”
~ Andrew Lang
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