Monitoring your blog stats for 31dbbb
Back on July 4, we were to analyze a top blog in our individual blog niche, but we had to postpone. Here we are, combining two complementary topics: analyzing a top blog in our niche and monitoring the stats on our blog.
Remember you were supposed to install a stats tracker on your blog? Open it up and pull the stats from July 1 until July 28. That’s a nice, solid period of about a month beginning the first day of 31dbbb here at yeah write.
A screenshot of July 1-July 28 for yeah write itself:
All of our numbers are up, which is usually one of the goals when taking on a project such as 31dbbb. Your stats tracker helps determine if all the work you put into the project is worthwhile. It also helps if you set a goal beforehand. Looking for a 30 percent increase in total visitors? If that was the goal for yeah write, we exceeded it (we didn’t set a goal beforehand; next time, though).
Bounce rate is another number significant to our writing project. We want our visitors to stick around a while. In the 28-day period displayed in the above graphic, our bounce rate—the amount of time/number of actions a visitor completes on your blog before bouncing away) improved from 35 percent to 20 percent. During 31dbbb, a full 80 percent of our visitors completed at least one action before bouncing off to another web site or blog. We held the attention of 80 percent of our visitors long enough for them to check us out, no matter their original reason for stopping by. That’s good stuff.
Where did our visitors come from?
Most of our visitors (64%) came from a direct link, meaning the visitor headed directly to yeah write without any social media prompting or being sent here by email and whatnot. Our second-largest referral was links. That’s our yeah write badges at work during the weekly writing challenges or any 31dbbb participating blogs. Third was “advertising” which is how Clicky, our stats tracker, interprets referrals from our MailChimp weekly email blast or any Facebook promoted posts. Social media shares (2.7%) were additional pieces of happiness, but most of the referrals came from hard work: building relationships with our readers, hosting weekly events and sending yeah write directly into readers’ email boxes or promotional feeds. Growing your blog doesn’t just happen; you really do have to work for it.
Analyze a top blog in your niche
How do you know which blogs to choose for comparison with your blog? Don’t pick the biggest ones out there unless you have about 50,000 unique visitors a month. You’ll just get your feelings hurt and become unnecessarily discouraged. Top blog shouldn’t mean stratospheric. Choose one you love. One that seems to be doing all the things right you dream of getting right.
Here’s a good scale to give everyone some perspective. Where does your blog fall? Yeah write falls between “a small blog with passing interest” and “a mid-traffic blog with sustained readership”. Some days, it feels like we have the sustained readership numbers, then our stats tell the true story. Yeah, we’re passing interest, but we are working hard every day to get to the next level.
However, we shouldn’t get caught up in pure numbers while forgetting that 20 percent bounce rate. A significant percentage of our readership is engaged with what we are saying, and that’s very important to us. Set your goals based on what’s important to you.
We recommend this: figure out where your blog is on this scale, then analyze a blog one step ahead of yours. What is that blogger doing right? What is that blogger doing successfully that you would still do another way, your own way?
How do you find out the data for another blog?
Dig around. Most bloggers trying to make money off their sites are obsessed with their stats, and they’ll have an entire page devoted to Alexa or Klout scores or Google PageRank or, if you’re lucky, straight-up monthly unique visitor data. You can also make a pretty good guess based on comment count. If they have 238 comments on a post about ketchup, that’s a good bet that blogger has a sustained readership. But don’t base it all on numbers, especially if you’re tracking a writer’s blog. One, data is easily manipulated. Two, on micro-niche blogs, the numbers will be smaller and you’ll analyze it mainly because the subject is important to you.
The important thing is to find a blog in your niche (not sure of your niche? Check your elevator pitch) that will serve as a model for improving your own space.
Questions, concerns, encouragement, suggestions in comments…
I*did* install clicky, a long time ago, and then forgot to check for a while & they stopped compiling. Guess I should get the paid-for service instead of the free one. But I’m kind of clueless about what all the stats mean – your explanation, for instance, was the first time “bounce rate” meant anything to me. Nor can I ever get google analytics to work for me. And is “promoting” a post via Facebook – that’s considered sort of bad form, yes? Because I confess to being on the one hand tempted by having scores of followers (like, thousands), and then thinking that I should be above it all…
thoughts?
I do have thoughts! I click on my friends’ posts in my FB feed because that’s the best way for me to find out about them. That and Twitter. No one should feel skeevy about it, think of it like a family newsletter.
But what I meant about FB promotion: if it’s an important piece, $5 to promote it is a good investment. You can go from “32 people saw this” to about 800. It’s easy to do in one click.
About the stats: install it again. Either the free or the lowest premium. (I don’t know why the free would have stopped collecting data) You can ask me to explain what each of them means as you go along until you get a handle on it. It’s just important to know what’s working and what’s not. Helps you focus.
I *did* install it again and now (depressingly) it works. I mean, it’s great that it works but the numbers make me sad. And then of course I realize that…er…I have been derelict about new content, despite all best intentions of following the 31 day regimen. Didn’t lose 5 pounds either, so there’s that. And my bounce rate is abysmal. Which is to say HIGH. Dammit. Must.Do.Better. And here’s one for “the internet is a weird place” : a post I wrote two years about hymen gel, which I found in an Abu Dhabi pharmacy, consistently turns up in search engines. And no, I DO NOT know what it’s for. Am going to study my analytics data & then get back to you. Plus the SEO stuff is really interesting too. mwah.
Just today I found out where all the emails from yeah write have been hiding (note to self: nesting labels in Gmail is a good way to lose messages). I missed the important tidbit provided by From Novels to Boardbooks that I could use Clicky on wordpress.com. A belated thank you. I installed it today!
It’s weird to me this wasn’t a more popular topic. Flood and I would spend hours back when we first started blogging analyzing who stopped by our spaces and why. Maybe that was just us.
I’m glad you got Clicky installed. Let me know if you need help setting up the ins and outs. Stats are valuable towards knowing what your readers are looking for, and how you can answer any questions they may have.
I agree! I was going to offer a peek into my stats for anyone who wanted ’em– either via sharing the numbers direct, or by giving some sort of faux-admin-leve-login– because looking at other sites’ stats was really helping when I was learning what was what and what I thought was important (since stats are so relative, anyway). But when I browsed the comments, and saw silence, I thought maybe I missed something.
I also thought the advice to go a bit above your current point to analyze was great advice!
Stats are awesome, people. Where’d the math love go? 🙂
Your reply made me feel much better, Rarasaur. I’d be interested in seeing your stats. Let me know the best way we can share and I’ll match your shared details stat-for-stat!
Okay, I couldn’t figure out the admin view, but I can snap some screen shots and email them– is there anything specific that you’d like to see? 🙂 Or should I just go snap crazy? 😀
Go snap crazy! I’d love to see unique monthly visitors for July (summer) and January (winter), two traditionally low- and high-points for visits. Once I get all your screenshots organized, I’ll send yeah write data for the same points. Thanks so much!