Quick Tip – Use Web Analytics to Your Advantage

Posted by George

January 22, 2009

You have your blog all setup. You use great design, widgets and coding. You submit your blog to directories, post comments on other blogs and follow social networking fundamentals. Sounds like you are doing just about everything to make your blog a success, or are you? bar_graph1

Web analytics is a great way to see what is happening on your blog. Researching your web log reports is often an overlooked practice for some bloggers. By studying your reports, you can find a plethora of information about your readers. This can help you in making your blog more of a success. Most web hosting companies will automatically provide detailed web log reports with your hosting account. I would check with your web hosting company to see how to access your reports.

So, just what can you learn from your web analytic reports? The most basic information found is how many people are visiting your blog. Now, what other things can you find out that you can use to “tune” your blog?

Which posts are the most popular for visiting users? – You can use this to maybe write more posts on those subjects. You can also setup landing pages for more popular topics.
How long are users staying on your site? – You can check to see what amount of time users stay on particular pages of your blog. Among uses for this information could be: Users not staying on longer written posts? You can use this information to adjust your posting length or change something on those posts.
Where are your readers coming from? You can see the country, ip address and ISP where users come from. This can be handy for finding spammers. You can also make some specific content for certain regions visiting your blog.
What sites are referring to your blog? This information is very valuable. This can show you what sites are linking to you and where your readers are finding you. You can generate possibly relationships with those referring sites from this information.
What search engines are referring traffic to you? This can tell you from what search engines your readers are originating from. This will give you insight as to what keywords readers are searching for and what ranking your blog is on those search engines.

Among those listed above, there is even more information inside web logs reports that can help you with your blogging success. Viewing your web analytics data, at least once a week, will help you in targeting information out to your readers.

As I said before, usually, your web hosting company will have web reporting setup as part of your hosting plan. If you are interested in some other tools to use for web log reporting, there are many to choose from. I will just touch on a few popular ones.

Google Analytics – This is a free reporting service from Google. It is as easy as signing up with your Google account, copy and pasting some code into your site and then watching the reports from Google.

Awstats – This is an open source program that will ingest your web traffic logs and output reports with graphical charts.

Web Trends – This is an enterprise application that is a pay product. It will also ingest your logs and produce helpful information about your web traffic. Web Trends also has many other products in their line of enterprise reporting line.

Urchin – This is software from Google which is also free. It is for users that want to use their own reporting inside their corporate networks. This is another great tool for producing reports on your web traffic.