04 Jan Analyzing your blog statistics
With a new year here, it’s the time that most businesses review the strategies that they used last year and come up with the game plan for 2011. One of the important things to look at when you’re determining what worked and what didn’t on your blog is your statistics. You know I’m not just about the numbers, but there are specific things you can look at to get insight into how your readers feel about the content you’re producing.
1. Which topics your readers are looking for – this one is pretty simple to judge. The posts that have the most direct traffic are the ones that people are most looking for.
2. Which posts are most enjoyed – take a look at how long people are spending looking at each post. The posts that were only glanced at for a few seconds clearly weren’t especially appealing. Thirty seconds or more at least means they gave it a glance, and a minute or more means they were reading and processing what you wrote. It could be a combination of the topic and the style that makes a post appealing!
3. If a post was stimulating – if you’ve gotten a lot of comments, it’s fair to say you’ve either written something genius or really hit a nerve. Either is good.
4. If you have regular readers – those that find your blog by searching for a specific topic will land on that blog post itself, not the main blog page (yourwebsite.com/blog or blog.yourwebsite.com). Those that visit your main blog page directly are either searching for your business’ blog, going to it after they’ve already landed on your website, or they’re return visitors. Of course, if you want you can dig a little deeper and find out which of those scenarios are true of your readers, but it any case, you know you’ve got a captive audience of regular readers by looking at how many people go directly to your blog. Subscription numbers can also provide this insight, but not everyone who subscribes reads, and not everyone who reads subscribes.
5. Effective SEO posts – you know you’ve got a strong, keyword rich post when it’s still getting a substantial number of visits even when it’s no longer new.