This post is part of the Common Sense Blogging series. To catch up, check out last week’s post, “SEO or Social Media.”
How Not to Get Caught Up in Analytics and Statistics
If you’re like most of us, the link to your statistics or analytics plugin/tool is well-worn by now; every day you are checking, analyzing, planning… asking yourself, how can I get more visits? How can I increase the average time on site? How can I increase visits from search engines? Endless questions, endless strategies.
We do need to measure what’s going on with our site from time to time. But instead of getting all wrapped up in the numbers, try to incorporate the following 4 practices into your strategy. You’ll end up with much more useful information.
Photo Credit: Empowerment Blogger (flickr)
1. Focus On Your Goals
Unless you are blogging just for the heck of it, you probably have some goals defined for your blog. Perhaps you want people to contact you for services, or perhaps you want them to click on ads so you can make money. Maybe your goal is to get readers to share your content across the social bookmarking spectrum.
Focus on whether or not these goals are being accomplished, instead of the stats. And don’t build your goals around stats, either. Someone recently told me that he wants to increase the average time spent on his site. This is not a well-defined goal. It will mean nothing, in the end, if increased time doesn’t turn into more clients. For him, the goal should be more clients, not increased time on site. (If someone comes and spends two seconds on the site before filling in a contact form and then hiring him, are those two seconds really going to matter?)
2. Measure growth in relationships and connections, not in site traffic
Site traffic is one of many positive byproducts of relationships and connections. Instead of focusing on how much traffic your site is getting, focus instead on who is visiting. Are your social networking efforts paying off? Are you establishing new relationships as a result of your blogging? How can you tell?
3. Figure out how much your community is giving back
How people interact with your content is much more important than the number of eyeballs seeing it. The reason: Sheer numbers by themselves mean nothing. If 50 million people come to your site tomorrow, you’ll have some bragging rights. But what else will you have to show for it? If those 50 million people do nothing with your content – no sharing, no discussion, and no real consumption, what are you really holding? Nothing but a number.
4. Use numbers more intelligently
Stats do carry some weight. But by themselves they are meaningless. Look at them intelligently. For example, take notice of all factors – day of the week, time of day, your social media marketing efforts and social networking efforts in order to really get an idea of what’s going on.
Suggested Statistics Plugin
For WordPress: I like the very basic, tried and true WordPress.com stats (aka Blog Stats). You can see the three main things: where visitors are coming from, what they are viewing and what they are clicking on. Best of all, it doesn’t count your own visits to your blog. Self-hosted WordPress users can install this plugin, and use the API key you should have already (because of Akismet Anti-Spam). If you don’t have an API key, you can get one easily by going to WordPress.com and signing up for an account. You do not need to get a blog at the same time; a username is all you need to get the API key.
Should you use Google Analytics?
It certainly doesn’t hurt to have a Google Analytics account for your blog, but please note that it’s not particularly user-friendly. I have been using it for a couple of years on all of my sites and client sites, and I can attest to the fact that it hasn’t become any easier to use over time. Again, it’s not a bad idea to have it installed and tracking, but don’t spend a lot of time trying to understand how to use it.
If you use Google Adwords, though, then I suggest installing Analytics and using the two together to measure how well your advertising is doing.
Note: If you know of other analytics tools that have worked well for you, feel free to reply in the comments section.
Summing It Up
Never stress over stats. If your blog isn’t where you want it to be, there are probably some very logical steps you can identify to get it there. Check out my Resources page, where I’ve pulled together several things you can utilize to launch your blog.
About Tia Peterson
