With only 2 days left of the Problogger challenge, it is time to analyze the traffic to my blog. If you have never looked at analysis statistics and want to know what to look for, he gives you 17 different metrics to look at.
Analysis of my stats is one of the reasons I love wordpress – there are great plugins that make it so much easier! I use both google analytics and statpress reloaded plugins to monitor visitors, feeds, posts, etc. Why do I use both? They both serve different purposes.
If I just want to take a basic look at my stats, statpress allows me to do so without leaving my dashboard. It gives me weekly and monthly visit numbers and compares them to the prior week and month. It gives me the top visited pages, the number of visitors vs pages viewed and where they came from. I can also see prominent search terms that get people to my site and which search engines and browsers they use. Of course I can also see what sites refer people to my blog (twitter is #1, no surprise).
For a more in-depth analysis, where I can customize the comparisons, check on what links inside of a post have been clicked or which post is most popluar via rss feed, I need google analytics. It can show me seasonal trends, referral sources from months back, and I can transfer all the data into a spreadsheet. Lastly, it will also show me the time spent on my site – what pages they were on the longest and what pages they left from most often. This allows you to check those pages and see of there is a way to keep people there longer. Of course, all of this is in addition to the stuff that statpress can do. The upside to google is that I can get way more data than statpress gives me. The downside? I have to go to google analytics’ site to see the data.
Basically, I use statpress on a daily basis, to watch for changes and trends. I use google analytics about once a week to delve indepth and see what is really going on with the traffic on my blog.
What do you use to track your stats? If you don’t track your stats, why not?
Related posts:
- Are you actually using your analytics?
- Why do you still need an SEO strategy if you have good content?
- Can I solve your problem today?
Kirsten
