Help for authors timid about technology
What do your readers want? Without knowing the answer you can’t make them happy. Tracking your site stats allows you you to make adjustments to thrill your readers.
If you want advocates you need to read this post.
Hits Are Misleading
Tracking hits gives you an and incomplete picture. Many of your “hits” come from non-human visitors called spiders. These “bots” collect information for search engines or leave you spam comments. It is important to know how many humans visit your site, what they look at and why. Tracking Hits doesn’t answer these question.
Comments Don’t Match Traffic
Comments are also a poor way of tracking traffic. I have a page on ThomasUmstattd.com that is my most visited page. It gets hundreds of unique visitors every week. But it only has one comment. I have other posts that get no traffic but have over a dozen comments.
Analytics Are the Key
An analytics package like google analytics tells you much more than just how many hits you have. It answers more than just “how many” but also “who,” “where” and “why.” Here are some popular analytics solutions.
Analytics Solutions:
- Google Analytics – Free, accurate and easy to setup. Google analytics makes it easy to track the stats for several sites all at once. AuthorTechTips Pick!
- Woopra – Free, fast and snazzy looking.
- SiteMeter – SiteMeter has been around for a long time. Free package does not give you much info though.
- WordPress.com – If you use wordpress.com you already have an excellent analytics package. They even have a great video explaining how to use it.
Google Analytics
Google analytics will give you the following information and more:
- Where your visitors come from. Which sites refer the most people to your blog?
- What your most popular posts are.
- What search engines your users are using.
- What keywords they search to find your site. Use this information to focus new content on those keywords. If you can “own” a word or phrase in google you win.
- What part of the country they are from. You might be surprised how many international readers you have.
- What browsers they use. Make sure your blog looks good on those browsers. Not everyone uses internet explorer.
- What pages they visit and in what order. Do people just visit one page and bounce away or do they go from page to page?
- What pages have the lowest bounce rate. Bounce rate is the percentage of people who leave your website after visiting that page.
What do you think?
What do you use to track site visitors? Do you like it?
No related posts.
Hi Thomas, How do you recognize spam comments? I just started a site after Mount Hermon and recently I think I’ve spotted some. BTW I don’t require people to sign in to comment. I just monitor. So what should I look for?–Do I just delete the url or the whole comment?
Thanks, Donna Fitzpatrick
Most spam is left by robots. If you use wordpress on your own server you can install anti spam plugins that detect these “bots” and automatically catch spam for you. They work well.
If you don’t use self hosted wordress I would look for comments that link in the text to a website that has nothing to do with your post. There is rarely a reason to include more than one link in a comment so I would also be suspicious of comments with lots of links.
Warning Signs:
-Off topic
-Super vague
-Links to non related subjects
Readers should look at downloading SEO tools for fire fox. An client of mine who does some SEO work turned me on and it’s really informative. I use it not only to check my site but to gather info on client’s & for clients & their businesses.
Michael
great page i found it very helpful
Hi Thomas,
I just went to the Google Analytics site and am now panicked because I don't have a clue where to put the code they gave me. Any help greatly appreciated. Is there a step by step how to somewhere? Mary
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Hey Mary,
The easiest way for you to embed the tracking code is with one of the Google Analytics WordPress plugins. I recommend Google Analyticator. You can find it at http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/google-analyt….
The other option is to paste the tracking code into your theme. But if code makes your eyes glaze over then the plugin is probably your best option.
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