You may have seen that lately I have been reviewing several blog stats packages. I realised I was assuming you care about stats. Why should you even be bothered?
It's all about the content isn't it? Why should we care about metrics?
I hear you say.
There's gold in them there stats, you just need to dig to find it. Obviously the best way of finding out what your readers think is to ask them but you can tell a great deal from your statistics and they are especially good for seeing trends over time. The better you understand what people want the better you can serve your audience!
Here are some of the key stats (in no particular order) to look at occasionally to make sure you are on the right track.
- Session Length - how long people stay on your blog is a good indication of how interesting they find the content. Many blogs are practically designed to send their traffic away as soon as they arrive by using a "lots of links" posting style or by pushing the advertising. Longer posts might help but then again they might not necessarily be the solution, it could be a problem with your navigation - how easy is it to navigate to other posts or the homepage from deep in your blog?
- Page Views - the total page views is an obvious metric to look at but the number of pages viewed on average per session will also tell you a great deal. If on average your readers view one page in a session then you could almost double your page views by just getting them to view one extra page. Many blogs will have low average page views because a visitor will arrive via RSS and leave by one of your links but you should aim to increase this metric any way you can because a new visitor is way more likely to subscribe if they see several posts they like rather than just the single post that attracted them in the first place. Use "related posts" and emphasise your categories to influence readers to seek out other content that might interest them, also sprinkle links to other posts liberally throughout your copy.
- Search Phrases - internal and external searches will give you an idea of what people are looking for in your blog. External search traffic is good for monetizing your archives while internal searches will give you a better idea of what your audience likes. I personally think that maybe internal searches could be people using your blog as a reference, they remember seeing a post and can't recall where to find it.
- Popular Pages and Number of Comments - these are the best indicators of what your visitors are interested in. Popular pages are those with the most traffic and you need to see if the majority of the readers of the top posts came from inside or outside your blog. Those that are arriving from the outside are coming because of promotion of buzz, those from the inside were attracted by your headline writing skills usually (although there are those who just click down from top to bottom looking at everything). The number of comments is also a decent measure of interestingness but you need to be aware that not all posts are "commentable" and as Nick likes to say, people like talking about themselves.
- Links in and out - your referrals are people to keep happy and warmed up. You need to keep consistent sources of traffic very happy indeed by both commenting on their blog and linking back. It is not a bad idea to see if there are trends in the sort of content they like to link to and throwing them a post that matches their taste on occasion. Links out are similar, if your audience likes a certain type of link then make sure you give them what they want. Don't worry about losing traffic, they will like to return to get more of your great links.
- RSS - Feedburner and Bloglines are great ways of seeing how many subscribers you have right now but also think about matching up events with boosts in subscriber numbers. You might find that slashdotting that gave you all that tremendous traffic did nothing for your subscribers but that small link from Joe Blogger gave you 20 new subs. Sometimes you just need one great post linked from the right place to bring in a load of new loyal readers.
- Tags and Links - Technorati/Dig/Del.icio.us are worth keeping an eye on, they tell you what the blogosphere likes to see from you. So far we are only just learning what people like to reference on Performancing, we will let you in on our research in a later post!
- Browsers - not one to get too sweaty about but worth a glance just once. Not so much for what browsers your audience are using but for which they are NOT using to view your blog. Most blog templates are very cross browser friendly but you would be amazed how many I have seen that have major glitches in IE, Firefox or are unusable on a Mac.
- Timing - you need to aim to get your best content up every day before the bulk of your visitors arrive. You might also find that there is a best day to get linked, a slow news day or a day where you get the majority of your comments.
I am not for a minute suggesting you spend lots of time on this every day. The occasional drill down your stats though could make a world of difference in understanding what your audience want from you.
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