Having great tracking and analytics is like having a great map and compass for your business. You need to know where you are and where you need to go from here if you’re going to run a successful blog.
Here’s how to use analytics to figure out what you’re doing right or wrong and how to get more traffic in the future.
=> Setting Up Tracking and Analytics
Google Analytics is easy to set up on Blogger – all you need to do is set up an account and flip the switch. In WordPress, all you need to do is install a plug-in to get your tracking off the ground.
Although there are many other tools you can use to track your results, Google Analytics will provide 99% of all the stats you’ll generally need.
=> Track Your Top Posts
One of the things you always need to be looking at is which posts are popular on your blog.
Which posts get the most traffic? Which posts do people spend the most time on? Which posts get the most backlinks? Which posts get the most search engine traffic?
You can find this data under the “Content” tab of Google Analytics.
Once you know what your readers love, you can try and put out more content along those lines. You can also feature articles that people liked most more prominently on your blog.
=> Track Your Referring Traffic
Who’s sending you traffic? Where are your backlinks coming from?
By knowing who your powerful fans are, you can reach out and potentially form partnerships and turn backlinks and fans into business partners.
Find out who likes your content enough to link to you. Then reach out and see if there’s more you two could potentially do together.
=> Track Your Keywords
What are people typing in in order to land on your site? The actual keywords people are typing in to get to your site could be totally different than the keywords you first set out to target.
By tracking what keywords you’re ranking for and what people are typing in, you can have a better idea of what you might want to target in future posts.
=> Other Things to Track
If you have a Facebook page and a Twitter account, you’ll naturally want to track the number of followers and likes you’re getting.
Also, track how many people are reading your RSS feed and which pages are most downloaded via RSS. You RSS stats can give you a very good idea of how strong your headlines are, as often that’s all people have to go on before deciding if they want to read your whole article.
These are some of the most important things to track when you’re blogging, along with how to use the stats once you have them. Good tracking and analytics is crucial to blogging success. Whether you’re getting a lot of traffic yet or not, make sure you set up a tracking system now if you haven’t already. The data will be invaluable.