One of the things that I do every day is look at my statistics. I look at my Twitter statistics, Pinterest statistics, and the statistics for this blog…every day. I also do calculations for these statistics. My statistics have told me a lot about my marketing strategies and following tactics. Here are the three things your statistics are trying to tell you.
- What days were really good. There is usually a spike in traffic. You can see what was working very well on that day and mimic it for your other days.
- The really bad days. We want to avoid having bad days for as long as we can. In order to avoid them, you have to look at your really bad days, identify what went wrong, and avoid doing those things for future days.
- Your best referrers. Where are you getting a majority of your traffic from? My statistics tell me every day that Twitter is a big source of my traffic. They also tell me that Pinterest and Search Engines go back and forth for second place.
- Your blog’s growth pattern. When I first started to blog, my blog experienced small growth. On some months when my blog grew, the next month my blog would go on the decline. Lately, my blog has been going in a good path lately. Here are my number of monthly views from November 2012 to December 2012 in order: 38, 81, 72, 75, 46, 172, 191, 220, 595, 586, 1268, 2070, 3862, 5128. These statistics are telling me that what I have been doing lately is working very well. They are also telling me that what I was doing in the beginning was not effective (the drops in monthly traffic). Right now, I’m on pace to getting 9,000 views for January 2014, but that could go up to 10,000.
- Views VS Visitors statistics. In order to understand these statistics, you need to understand the difference between views and visitors. A visitor comes to your blog from a referrer (Twitter, Google, etc), and if that person clicks on the links of 2 of your blog posts, that’s 2 views. You want to have a lot more views than you have visitors because that indicates your visitors are sticking around. Once they go on your blog, they are reading your other blog posts, clicking on your links to older blog posts, and this results in a really good bounce rate.
Your blog’s statistics are telling you a lot of things. I recommend listening to your blog’s statistics for 5-10 minutes every day and see what you can learn.
Grace says
On my blog, you can just scroll down to read previous posts, so how would I read my stats in that case?
Marc Guberti says
Grace, your blog statistics are available on your WordPress dashboard. No one gets to see them other than you, but you have the option of publishing some of the statistics from your blog if you choose to do so (I would not recommend anyone to do that because it just takes up space. If you want people to know some of your statistics, mention them in some of your articles here and there). WordPress offers a plethora of great statistics that allow you to see when you got a lot of traffic and which articles on your blog were getting the most visits during any of those times.
Ribu Roby says
You are right friend. Daily I’m checking this to, it give me some satisfaction if the number is good..
Marc Guberti says
Ribu, I am happy to hear that you are checking your blog’s stats. Blog stats are as close to a truthful fortune teller as we can get to.
linda says
So informative Marc! Just what I needed as my website is about to be live.
Marc Guberti says
I’m glad I could help. I wish you luck with your website.