Blogging as a business requires you to know a few things about who is coming to your site, where they came from and what content they are viewing. In order to have a successful business, you need to a way to analyze and track this information. I personally use Google Analytics for this purpose. It provides an accurate account of my blog statistics plus it’s a FREE service.
I check the following statistics on a regular basis:
- Visitors and unique visitors
- Pageviews
- Content
- Referring sites
Knowing your blog’s statistics enables you to determine what posts your visitors are reading (so you can write more on those subjects), which sites provide you the most referral traffic and keywords that brought visitors to your site from search engines.
Additionally, it allows you to accurately provide statistical information to advertisers and companies for paid opportunities. I am frequently asked for my number of monthly pageviews and unique visitors when I am being considered for a paid opportunity. Google Analytics allows me to easily provide this information current to the previous day.
I also like the graph feature for viewing my site number trends. It’s interesting to see where I am at on a particular day and the trends my visitors follow. For instance, Wednesday’s are my highest traffic day. Since that is the day a majority of grocery store ads come out; I always have a spike on that day. Knowing your traffic can also help you work on which days may be a “slow” day. You can strive to attract new visitors to your site on those days to generate more traffic and revenue.
There are countless other programs can that track website traffic. I started my site using Site Meter. While I have left site meter on my site to gauge my traffic from conception; Google Analytics provides more detailed and relevant information.
Spend some time learning the some of the features of Google Analytics and set a goal for yourself to help grow your blog to a new level.
Do you use Google Analytics? What is your favorite feature?
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