Top 10 Blog Statistics You Should Be Tracking

Tracking blog statistics might seem like a boring task to some, while to others it might be almost an obsession. Regardless of where you fall on the scale of interest, you really should be tracking your blog statistics.

First, you should have a traffic tracking widget or plug-in installed on your blog. Google Analytics is one of the most popular, so we'll talk about that in this post. 

Here's the top 10 Stats you should be tracking:

1. Overall Visitors - From week to week and month to month, is the number of visitors to your blog going up? This is a good indication of how your traffic-generation strategies are working for you.

2. Traffic Sources - Where are your visitors coming from? If you haven't a clue, you need to find out! Knowing the top sources of your visitors will give you a good idea as to where you might want to focus your efforts. On the flip side, it will also show you where your efforts may not be producing the results you want.

3. Bounce Rate - This is one of the least understood but in our opinion, one of the most important statistics. A bounce rate is a measure of whether people click on links or read other pages in your blog...or just leave from the same page on which they arrived. If your bounce rate is 50%, for example, that means half of your visitors leave without looking at any other page on your blog except the one on which they first arrived.

If your bounce rate is 5%, it would mean that 5% left without reading deeper into your blog, but 95% clicked on a link and looked at least one other page on your blog.

Your bounce rate is a good indicator as to how interesting visitors find your blog. It also is a great indicator as to whether or not your traffic generation strategies are targeting the people who would find your blog most interesting.

4. Average Time on Site - How long do your visitors stay on your blog? Often referred to as "stickiness," how long your visitors stay is a good indicator of how interesting they find your blog. The longer the stay, the better the odds of them subscribing to your blog or other offerings you may have.

5. Page Views - How many pages of your blog are your visitors viewing? Again, the more pages your visitors look at, the better.

6. Keywords - This statistic shows you how visitors arrived from one of the search engines, like Google, by showing you the words or phrases they typed into the search engine. If you are deliberately targeting traffic through keyword-rich posts, this statistic can be a good indicator as to how well your efforts are producing. You may also be surprised to see some unexpected results.

If you use book titles or movie titles in your post title,for example, you may find people landing on your blog who were looking for information about that book or movie. Paying attention to the kewords that brought people to your blog can help you target your efforts in the future.

7. New or Returning Visitors - What percentage of your visitors are coming back to read more? Are you getting any new visitors each day? If you're not seeing a good proportion of new visitors, you may want to ramp up your traffic generation.

8. RSS Stats - How many people have currently subscribed to your blog through the RSS reader services? These are people who enjoyed your blog and don't want to miss any upcoming posts. Again, this is a good indicator of how well your visitors like your blog content.

9. Exit Pages - This is more of a trouble-shooting statistic. If this stat shows that a large percentage of visitors are leaving from the same page, take a look at that page. You will want to try to determine what it is about that page that is "turning off" your visitors.

10. Top Content - Understanding which posts your visitors find most interesting is key to knowing what you should be posting about in the future. This stat will show you the most popular (most read) posts on your blog. Keep an eye on what your readers are interested in reading. If your readers like how-to type of posts, then do more. If they like your motivational posts, then do more.

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The clues to what your visitors want are there. You simply need to read the signs by monitoring your statistics on at least a monthly basis. Over time, you'll have a much clearer picture of what works well and what does not.

Wishing you much success,

Robin