How To: Analyzing Your Most Popular Posts
It becomes a somewhat customary tradition by many bloggers after several months to a year or two to take an in-depth look at their stats, see which posts performed better than others, receiving a higher comment to traffic ratio. However, it takes time to effectively determine which posts readers found more useful, especially if your blog is new.
One of the big factors to keep in mind is your mindset about stats – do you aim high and won’t stop until you reach those limits, or do you generally aim low and hope for the best? In this respect, it is important to re-establish your goals. Did you want to make your blog a small community site or a large, mainly new visitor-driven site?
Once you have set your goals, you need to apply them to your traffic stats (a follow-up post will feature several popular online analytics tools). In regards to this, are you focusing on getting subscribers – creating a few high quality posts each week, or traffic – producing quite a few posts each day?
Main Areas to Look At
Posts/Content: Within Google Analytics or a similar program, search or order the “Content” to find which posts received the most traffic.
Subscribers: FeedBurner has a charts tool, found on each individual feed page, which you can correlate with the post date to see whether it brought in new subscribers. Alternately, “Popular Feed Items” provides a brief look at the posts that received the highest click through or read rate.
Social Bookmarking/Sharing Sites: Again, from within your preferred analytics site/software, see what site brought you the most traffic.
Other Stats: You can also take a look at bounce rate, time spent on each site, and traffic source (visitor’s origin) or search engine/keywords to access your content.
Simplified, the posts with a combination of: highest time spent on page, most visitors, a significant increase in subscribers, and a low bounce rate indicate that the post was effectively received by your target audience and visitors enjoyed it.
It is worth noting that social networking sites may create a false sense of accomplishment, as these visitors usually spend less time on your site and do not subscribe, unless there is a true benefit from vsiiting your site everyday.
are this mean we blogger are also entertainer
Some good information here. Thank you.
Question: which analytics sites do you prefer and do you recommend paying for additional features available beyond what is offered at their “Free” levels?
Thanks in advance.
@pandi merdeka – Yes, in some ways, it is. You are constantly trying to get people to “enjoy” and continue coming back to your blog.
@Carol – i will be creating the “ultimate” list/resource of analytics tools, which may be posted within a few days.
If you are on a limited budget, you can stick with Google Analytics (up to 5 million page views/month), as it offers enough tools for most purposes, and many larger blogs and companies also use it. Paying for extra features should be only if you truly need them. Most free services will do the job just fine.
I use google analytics also to see what posts are most popular on my site. It’s a great tool.