Blog Stats You Should Care About (They May Not Be What You Think)

When it comes to website traffic, the amount of blog stats and analytics available can be overwhelming. There are a lot of numbers to consider. Some are more important than others. Here are some of the best things to track and concentrate on when trying to increase your traffic and blog income.

Bounce Rate – to an extent

The amount of time a visitor stays on your site and the number of pages they view before leaving can be important to your overall success – to a point. When you are publishing a product review or directing a reader to make a purchase through your affiliate link, you want their next step to be leaving your site to make that purchase or visit your sponsor’s site.

However, when it comes to informational posts that showcase your authority and expertise, you want that visitor sticking around to read more posts and eventually join your email newsletter. When viewing your blog’s bounce rate, analyze those posts with the highest bounce rate. Are you directing them to an outside website or wanting them to stick around? If you decide that post is important and authoritative, try adding more internal links within a post linking to other relevant and related content.

Social Media Click-Through Rate

So much emphasis is put on “social media engagement.” I don’t know about your blog, but mine doesn’t earn a penny off Facebook Likes or comments. At the end of the day, I want those people on Facebook, Pinterest and Twitter visiting my blog. If you aren’t getting the CTR (Click-Through Rate) you would like to see, try experimenting with better headlines. I have a list of 101 of them here.

Income Per Visitor

Another great number to analyze is your income per visitor. To get this number simply take your total blog income divided by your Unique Visitors, now called Users in Google Analytics. This number may be way lower than you ever expected. That’s okay. It gives you something to work on. Rather than trying to sell, sell, sell in upcoming posts, go back through your older popular posts and look for affiliate or advertising opportunities within that existing content.

Conversion Rate

Those blogging mentors preaching pageviews, pageviews and only pageviews are likely relying on display ads for a large majority of their online income – not something I’d recommend. Instead, you want to get your visitors engaged with your content and trusting enough of your recommendations to make purchases of your products or affiliate products . Another form of conversion that should be of high importance to you is email newsletter opt-ins.

You can easily track many of these conversions by spending just a few minutes in Google Analytics. I have a great tutorial here on how to set up the tracking of email signups. Once you have that done, you can start analyzing which social networks, blog referrals and content on your site are sending you the best, aka converting, traffic.

Referral Sources

There are so many great reasons to find out which of your fellow bloggers are sending you great traffic. It opens a great line of communication to discuss additional partnership opportunities. By promoting them, you may be able to get yourself a few more mentions on their site. To find your referrals, and where they are referring to you within their content, take a look in your Google Analytics.

1. Acquisition
2. All Traffic
3. Referrals
4. Set your Secondary Dimension as Full Referrer

You will likely see quite a few social media networks here. Ignore those for now. You want to look for blog posts from other bloggers. Export the list if you need to.

Once you know what posts around the web are sending you the most traffic and the highest converting traffic if you are tracking newsletter signups or sales, promote the heck out of these posts. Put them into your social media sharing schedule. Get them Pinned to your boards. The more they are shared around the web, the more traffic they get. The more traffic they get, the more traffic you get.

Open Rate

When it comes to your email newsletter list, size isn’t all that counts. If none of your 10,000 subscribers open your emails, who cares? The numbers you want to look at in your newsletter service are open rate and click-through rate. You want your subscribers opening your emails and taking the desired action you are soliciting.

If you find your open rate is less than stellar, most industries see an average open rate of 20-25%, try working on your subject lines. Another great way to get more people opening your emails is to offer subscriber-only content in your newsletters. It doesn’t need to be anything difficult. You can simply share some helpful links from around the web or a few tips of your own.

When it comes to analyzing your blog stats, you need to know where you are coming from and where you are going. Get yourself a great spreadsheet to track your results and goals. Sit down on the first of each month to jot down your income and stats from the last month. Compare it to the previous month’s numbers and establish a marketing strategy and things you want to work on in the upcoming month.