|
Which Blog Stats Should You Track? |
|
There are some great whizbang widgets online that will let you devote hours a day to measuring every conceivable statistic about your blog.
- Latest visitors
- Bandwidth
- How much time they spent
- Page they came in on
- Page they left on
- Referring page
- Country they are from
- Computer system they use
- Visitors by day of the week
- Visitors by hour of the day
- Browser they use
- Website they came in from (clicking on a link)
- Search keywords they entered
- Etc.
Well ... one thing you DON'T do is decide whether your blog is a success or failure by these numbers.
Write good, interesting, insightful stuff. Network with others in your niche. Promote your blog. Your real objective is to become a trusted destination for your niche.
How do you know if that is happening? Well, are your blog posts getting any comments? Have you made it easy for readers to post a comment? Interaction with your readers is often more important to your success than any other factor, no matter what your goal is.
Do people email questions to you? If not, then they don't trust you yet. I don't care if your blog used up 600 MB of bandwidth last month. If nobody is interacting with you, then you are not building relationships, and nobody will buy anything based on your recommendation.
Which makes all those other stats pretty lame. You could have 30,000 subscribers to your RSS feed. But so what? Do you get any RSS feeds? How many of those blog posts do YOU read? That 30,000 probably translates to just a handful of actual fans of your blog.
You could get several "Thumbs Up" in StumbleUpon today, and get 5000 hits on your blog ... and then none of those people ever returns. What's the point? That "5000 hits" stat is totally misleading - other than to tell you that this promotion did not work.
What is your blog purpose? Ad revenue? Then obviously, "ad revenue generated" is an important statistic. And what leads to ad revenue? Again, it's the number of readers who trust you and return to your blog again and again.
Another stat which is trickier to track, but may be very valuable to know, is: links to your blog from other bloggers. That implied or explicit endorsement has the potential to make a big difference to your market.
Conclusion? There are no hard and fast rules of which stats are most important. But probably, MOST of the easy stats to track aren't worth your time. It's up to you to describe exactly the result you really want from your blog, and then to decide which stats reflect your progress. |
