Growing your blog or growing your readership involves digging into the blog stats. Your blog stats will help you understand:
- Who is visiting your site
- Where visitors are coming from
- Specific posts or pages are being viewed
- How long visitors stay on your site
Get the Tools to Analyze your Stats
There are many blogging tools out there. You might even have blog analytics provided by your blogging platform. That said, some are better than others for providing reliable information. Google Analytics is recognized as the standard for measurement. It takes a bit of energy to install the tool, but once you have it installed you will find it very useful as an analytics tool. Use GA to:
- Understand your audience: visits, unique visitors, pageviews
- Find opportunities to promote your site
- Increase your site’s visibility
- Determine the effectiveness of your social media activity
Understanding the Stats Vocabulary
Pageviews
This number measures your site’s traffic—the number of times your site has been loaded over a specific time period. Usually this stat is given as the number of pageviews per month. The number includes all pages and posts.Why it is useful: this number is often required when you are applying to participate in blog campaigns or networks.
Unique Pageviews
Just like the name implies, unique pageviews is a subsection of pageviews. The unique page view stat is the number of individuals exposed to a page over a period of time. According to Google: "A unique pageview represents the number of sessions during which that page was viewed one or more times."For example, in Google Analytics a PAGEVIEW is counted each time someone hits on the page. If someone hits on the same page 5 times, it is tracked as 5 page views. For the same session, Google Analytics would only record the instance as 1 UNIQUE PAGEVIEW because it is all from the same user.
Unique Visitors
How many people have visited your site, excluding repeat visits.
Visits
This stat is the number of individual sessions initiated by all visitors to your site. Visits stats is the number people that have visited your site, including repeat visits. According to Google: "If a user is inactive on your site for 30 minutes or more, any future activity is attributed to a new session. Users that leave your site and return within 30 minutes are counted as part of the original session."
Clicks vs. Visits
In a nutshell, clicks applies to advertising and visitors relates to unique sessions by visitors. According to Google: "The Clicks column in your reports indicates how many times your advertisements were clicked by visitors, while Visits indicates the number of unique sessions initiated by your visitors."
Bounce Rate
This stat tells what percentage of users left your site after viewing only one page on your site.
Average Time on Site
How long each user spent on your site.
New Visits
The percentage of your users have not visited your site before.
Stats in Real Life:
Consider this example to help you understand the blog stats:
On your blog one person visits your blog 10 times in one month and looks at your home page each time.Plus, this person clicks on 4 posts to read more.And finally, that person goes to your About page one time.
Here's how that can be translated:
1 unique visitor
10 visits
15 pageviews can be broken down using the following:
- 10 home page views
- 4 specific post page views
- 1 About Page view
