Blog Tipz

Tracking a blog’s progress is a good way to get an idea of the direction that you need to take your blog. Whether or not your traffic is growing, whether you are seeing an increase in readership, and how to properly maximize your exposure to advertisers are some of the main reasons you should begin tracking.

Under most circumstances, tracking is extremely easy. All it takes is that you have some knowledge about how to install an analytics program (typically the code from Google Analytics or similar services) and some time setting up the account – this may be five minutes or so, especially if you’ve already done it in the past.

The real “work” comes after a few months of having the analytics or tracking suite installed on your site. Again, you shouldn’t really be keeping too close of an eye on your stats before this period, or your end results may be quite skewed. You are looking for a monthly (or half-monthly, if you want to really hone in on growth) overview of how your blog is performing on the key factors.

Using the Traffic Figures

The keys in analyzing your growth is what you do with the stats. Some will simply ignore them or become confused upon the sight of thousands of different numbers. In reality, everything is pretty separated, and you just have to realize that there are stark differences between page views, unique visitors, and regular visitors.

I’ll quickly define the differences and then we’ll get onto the next point.

Page view – When someone requests to visit a page. Most commonly used with advertising, as it is the number of actual pages visitors view.

Unique visitors – A statistic referring to each person that visits your site. You could have a thousand “visitors” but only one unique visitor, as they accessed your page a thousand times.

Visitors – The total number of people (including non-unique) that visited your site during the month. In the case of Google, they see ~147 million unique visitors but more than ~2.5 billion total visits during a month.

People who subscribe to your blog through RSS and email are also important factors in this but those are fairly self-explanatory.

When you are viewing the page containing your stats for the month, choose the option to export the information through XML or CSV, two popular formats that are easily importable into other programs. The key here is being able to replicate the graphs and information commonly found within the online versions so you can easily track your progress.

I realize that Google Analytics offers ways to focus on certain period, but creating different versions of the charts may result in a more easily understood version of this information.

Finding Trends

All blogs fluctuate in traffic. There are very few, if any sites, that will maintain the same number of visitors and readers each month. Stagnation rarely is a good thing – it means that your content isn’t enticing new visitors and new visitors aren’t discovering your site.

At most, I like to see 10% fluctuations month-over-month, but when on the course of a negative decline, this certainly is a high figure. Within ten months, your traffic would be nearing zero visitors.

Determine from charts and graphs that you create how well your traffic does during certain periods of the year and how you can try to spread the peak traffic periods throughout the rest of the year. The more you focus on certain periods, whether through creation of more in-depth content or by writing about seasonal topics, you can greatly increase traffic.

Ensuring Trends are Positive

The best way to ensure that your growth, readership, and advertising revenue remain constant or continue to grow is by developing a strategic method for growth. As the popular saying goes, “do what works.”

Noticing declines in traffic isn’t something you should begin to get worried about unless of course you’ve been neglecting your blog and haven’t responded to emails or comments for weeks.

Setting personal goals is one of the best ways to keep yourself on track for meeting goals. If you aren’t the owner or main author at your blog, focus on continuing to write the same quality and number of articles to ensure your pay rate stays the same and you are still able to attract a similar number of pageviews/comments.

All blogs are different in the number of page views they receive, but all are similar in the ways that you can increase traffic. Understand that tracking is just one element of continuing to grow your blog and growth is simply an indication that you are doing something right.