What are blog statistics and why should you track them?

Various aspects of your blog can be monitored like details about daily visits, popular posts on your blog, time being spent by users on your blog. It is extremely crucial to track blog statistics since it not only helps you track your traffic but also equips you with detailed insights that can help you optimize your blog performance. There are quite a few metrics, which can be tracked, and a few vital among them are:

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Page views:

This is one of the most interesting statistics that gets the advertisers interested. This metric tracks the number of times your blog was loaded on a web browser; i.e. the traffic coming to your blog.  Trends in the page views can shed light on information like reasons for a traffic spike, causes for a traffic dip and also what times of the day people are most active on your blog.

·

New users vs. returning users:

This metric helps you gauge the loyalty of your audience. A higher percentage of returning users indicates that you are providing value to your readers and they keep coming back for more while a lower percentage of returning visitors means you need to take steps to ensure that your readers keep coming back for more. To create a growing and sustainable blog you need to ensure that you have an almost equal percentage of new users to existing users.

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Bounce rate:

This can be defined as the number of visitors who immediately leave your blog as soon as they land on it. A higher bounce rate might indicate a mismatch between your blog’s content and the visitor’s expectations.

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Time spent on your blog:

You can determine the stickiness of your blog by tracking this metric. If your blog has riveting content than the time being spent by visitors on your blog would be higher.

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Referrals:

This metric highlights the sources, which are sending traffic your way. It helps you track what drives audience to your blog, whether it is another blog in your niche or a search engine that is sending traffic your way. Once you have identified your strong referring partners you can work on strengthening this relation so that they continue to send more traffic you way.

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Keywords:

They are basically the search engine queries that return your blog’s address in the search engine results. The information on traffic driving keywords is crucial since this information can be exploited to optimize your blog for these keywords so that your blog is more frequently displayed in the search results and is also ranked higher.

·

Popular pages:

This metric will highlight posts, which are pulling in the most traffic. This is useful information since it helps you figure out the preferences of your audience. You can also optimize these popular landing sites for advertising and promoting your other posts

·

Exit links:

This helps you locate the links, which result in your readers navigating away from the site. You need to optimize these links to ensure that you drive your reader exactly where you want to.

Many good services help you track all the above mentioned statistics and also a lot more details which can be exploited to enhance your blog.

We will discuss about just such a plugin, and our first entry into the Blog Tips and Tricks Approved list of services in our next post, so check back and see what the plugin we think can’t be done without.