Officially Lucky

My friend, super-blogger, and fellow Arsian, Josh Bancroft has a really keen post about how he tracks the various metrics of his personal blog (which gets quite a good bit of traffic!). I will admit it too, I am an analytics junkie too and I use a lot of the same metrics and tools as Josh does to see what content is doing good and where I can make improvements on my site.

This is another post that grew from an interesting conversation at work. We were discussing what site statistics/metrics are REALLY important to a blogger. That is, swimming in a sea of numbers and graphs and data, which are the ones that are the most meaningful to you as a blogger? That got me thinking about the ones that are most important to me, so off I went taking screenshots in Google Analytics, and this post was born. I had a lot of input from my friends on Twitter, where I conducted an impromptu Twitter InstaPoll(TM) to get their ideas, so thanks to them for their input. I’m also going to do a separate post on stats that are just plain fun to look at, but don’t really tell you anything useful.

As many of you might already know, my day job is working as the senior web developer for an advertising agency. As a core member of the interactive department, I’m called on more and more regularly to chime in on analytics, audience building, and other things of that nature for clients. I am of the opinion that one of the most important parts of deploying and maintaining a client’s online presence, whether it be full-blown corporate website, microsite, or intranet is tracking how people are interacting with that site, and the trending of several key metrics.

Bounce rates and how they change over time show, at least on a superficial level, how engaging people find your content. Traffic funnels and “goal conversions” can illustrate bottlenecks in your navigation structure and problems with your forms. Top performing content shows you what types of posts resonate with the online populous at large and with search engines in general.

As Josh so aptly demonstrates in post, all of these techniques can carry over very well to managing your personal sites and blogs as well. I have a set of three web pages I visit on a daily basis to see how my site has done. Those are Google Analytics, FeedBurner, and Google AdSense.

Old blog (phaedo.cx)

When it comes to Google Analytics, which tracks the majority of the data I review, I inspect a very small set of data on a daily basis. Number of unique visitors, page views, how many of my visitors are arriving via search engines like Google or Yahoo! and how many of those visitors comes from referrals (other blogs, news posts, forums, et cetera).

As I’m experiencing right now, you will see a much different pattern on a brand new site. This particular blog and domain has only existed for a few weeks, and I am currently in a phase of building a new audience. Getting a crowd to follow you to a new site is a challenge and I am finding it really interesting to see how my promotion efforts in regards to search engines and otherwise are slowly building an (even bigger) audience here.

New blog (blog.clintecker.com)

In addition to Google Analytics, and like Josh, I also use FeedBurner to track people following my RSS feeds. Furthermore, FeedBurner has some cool features that show you which posts people are clicking on the most. This can give you valuable insights into the types of titles, descriptions, and content that are striking a chord with your readership.

Finally, I track AdSense to see how my vast network of sites displaying Google Ads are doing. I currently have these running here, http://phaedo.cx (my old blog), http://arslounge.com (a community aggregator), http://www.htmini.com (an old blog I used to run), and some other places. Good content on all of these sites has allowed me to make what I consider really good “iTunes money.” Six months ago I was making $30 a month, in November I made $40, and in December I made $50. I’m hoping for this to grow as I get better with my blogging and networking skills!

I hope this has been enlightening to anyone looking to grow their new or existing blog/site into something bigger and perhaps something huge! I would also recommend reading through Josh’s post to get an idea of some good pages on Google Analytics to check if you’re a blogger.