Everything Analytics—Learn What the Numbers Really Mean to the Success of Your Blog

These days everyone’s talking about analytics and how important they are. Today I’ll give you the info you need to take your blog to the next level.

First let’s start with the basics. What are analytics? 

One way of defining analytics within the context of the Internet is this: a process of collection, measurement and analysis of visitor activity on a specific website. This process is intended to help the author understand and achieve the goal of the website. 

This definition brings up several important points, first and foremost you should have a goal for your blog. It’s critical to your success that you know what you want to accomplish with it. 

Do you want to:

• Connect with like minded people? 
• Share information?
• Build a platform or following?

All of these are great goals, but getting to each one will require a slightly different route. Before you can evaluate how well you’re doing you have to know where you’re going. 

Analytics can help you get there—if you know what you’re looking for.

Here are the most important statistics to look for:

• Unique hits.
• Returning visitors.
• Traffic graph.

A Unique Hit is a statistic describing a unit of traffic to a website, counting each visitor only once within a specific time frame, say ten minutes. So visitor A could click on your blog once in a ten minute time period or 25 times during the same ten minute time period and either way would only be counted as one unique hit.

Returning Visitors are important because we want people to come back regularly. This is the statistic that tracks this.

The Traffic Graph for your site helps you track the popularity of your posts and when people visit your site. This can give you valuable insight when you’re planning your schedule and deciding what to blog about.

This is just an introduction to analytics. On Thursday I’ll be giving you a run down of what the different analytic programs can offer. 

Now it's your turn. What questions do you have about the statistics you see? Have these statistics helped you tweak your blog and get closer to your goal?

Don't forget to join the conversation!

Blessings,

Edie