I am a big fan of statistics. I use statistics for all of my social networks, all of my YouTube videos, and for this blog as well. These are 10 places that I use to look at my statistics:
- WordPress provides so many statistics that it’s mind-boggling. You get to find out how your visitors were referred to your blog, which of your blog posts are the most popular, who’s subscribed to your blog, which countries visitors are from, what people click on once they get to your blog, and search engine terms people use to get to your blog.
You get to see all of the websites and search engines that refer traffic to your blog. My favorite part about this feature is that you also get to see which social networks are referring traffic. I know when Twitter is referring traffic and how many people came from Twitter in a particular day. When you get traffic from Pinterest, you also get to see which pins are referring people to your blog. You also get to see how many times an individual pin gets clicked on.
You also get to see your top posts and pages. If one of your posts is doing very well compared to the others, that is the content your visitors want to see more often. If you write a blog post similar to your popular blog post, that blog post will increase your traffic.
You also get to see which links on your blog are getting clicked. You’ll be able to identify which of your products are the most popular, and this will allow you to learn about where your sales are coming from. You will also be able to learn which of your social network icons is getting clicked on the most.
For blog subscribers, you get to see how long it has been since they subscribed to your blog. You get to see the number of hours, weeks, months, and years since they subscribed to your blog.
Most search engine terms are going to remain as unknown, but some search engine terms will show up. Those are the search engine terms that you should build your blog around, and they should appear as tags on your blog.
2. TwitterCounter is great for Twitter. You get to see how many people followed you on a particular day, the number of people you followed on a particular day, and the number of times you tweeted on a particular day. Free users get access to up to 6 months of their history while Premium users get more features such as statistics for mentions, retweets, and more than 6 months of statistics. TwitterCounter provides all of its users with estimations of when they will reach certain milestones. If you want to know when you will reach 1,000 followers, TwitterCounter will give you an estimate. TwitterCounter’s estimations are based on the average change in followers every week. Higher milestone estimates become available as you get more followers. When you get in the thousands, your milestones are going to be in factors of 500 (8,000 followers, then 8,500 followers, etc). When you reach 10,000 followers, your milestones are going to be in factors of 1,000 (11,000 followers, then 12,000 followers, etc). If you want to reach a certain number of followers before the New Year, looking at the milestones will help you determine if what you are doing right now will allow you to accomplish that goal.
3. PinAuthority is similar to TwitterCounter, but it works for Pinterest. Unlike most places where you can check Pinterest statistics, PinAuthority is free and provides statistics for up to 3 months. However, there are some problems with PinAuthority. The first problem is that once your statistics get updated, they can’t be updated until the next day. The second problem is that you have to manually check in on PinAuthority every day in order to get the statistics that TwitterCounter automatically provides for you. There are paid options that are better than PinAuthority such as Pin Reach, but PinAuthority will provide more statistics than any other free Pinterest statistics site. Pinterest is a new social network, and there aren’t any free Pinterest statistics websites like TwitterCounter just yet.
4. You can’t call yourself a statistics guy or gal if you don’t know about Bitly. Bitly provides statistics for the number of clicks based on intervals of 30 days, 14 days, 7 days, 24 hours, and the past hour. Bitly allows you to see which of your links are popular and where people are clicking those links. Just like WordPress, you get to see all of the referrers, but in addition to seeing the referrers, Bitly organizes the data into a pie chart. Right now, the referral traffic I get from Twitter looks like a Pac-Man compared to my other sources of traffic for my Bitly links. There is also a pie chart that allows you to see which countries these people are coming from. You can even track the statistics for individual links. Bitly provides a lot of amazing statistics, and it’s also a URL shortener for all of those long links.
5. Pin Alerts only offers one statistic, but the statistic they offer is crucial towards success. Pin Alerts sends an email informing you when something on your website gets pinned. You get informed about when your website was pinned, a link to the board that the pin resides, a link to the pin, and the person who pinned your pin. Pin Alerts allows you to receive this information, and if you keep all of Pin Alerts’ emails together, you can create a list of your fans who are on Pinterest. You can follow all of the people who pinned a picture from your website, and you can share the pin since you have the link. If your website has pictures and a Pin It button, then you really need to use Pin Alerts.
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