Blog Stats You Should Care About (They May Not Be What You Think)

By Angie Nelson

latest version February 12, 2018. Disclosure: We may receive compensation if you sign up or purchase products linked below. Details of offers may vary and you should confirm them with the company before taking action.

When it comes to website traffic, the amount of blog statistics and analytics available can be overwhelming. There are many numbers to consider. Some are more important than others. Here are some of the best things to track and focus on when trying to increase your traffic and blog income.

Bounce rate – to an extent

How long a visitor stays on your site and how many pages they view before leaving can be critical to your overall success – up to a point. When you’re publishing a product review or directing a reader to make a purchase through your affiliate link, you want their next step to be leaving your site to make that purchase or visit your sponsor’s site.

However, when it comes to informative posts that demonstrate your authority and expertise, you want visitors to read more posts and eventually join your email newsletter. When looking at your blog’s bounce rate, analyze those posts with the highest bounce rates Do you direct them to external websites or want them to stick around? If you decide that the post is important and authoritative, try adding more internal links within the post linked to other relevant and related content.

Social media click-through rates

So much emphasis is placed on “social media engagement”. I don’t know about your blog, but I don’t earn a dime from Facebook likes or comments. At the end of the day, I want those people to visit my blog on Facebook, Pinterest and Twitter. If you’re not getting the CTR (click-through rate) you want to see, try experimenting with better titles. I have a list Here’s 101 of them.

Revenue per visitor

Another big number to analyze is your revenue per visitor. To get this number simply divide your blog’s total revenue by your unique visitors, now called users in Google Analytics. This number may be much lower than you expect. All right. It gives you something to work with. Instead of trying to sell, sell, sell on upcoming posts, go back through your old popular posts and look for affiliate or advertising opportunities within that existing content.

conversion rate

Blogging consultants who are promoting pageviews, pageviews and only pageviews are probably relying on display advertising for the majority of their online income – not something I would recommend. Instead, you want your audience to engage with your content and trust your recommendations enough to buy your products or affiliate products. Another form of conversion that should be of utmost importance to you is email newsletter opt-ins.

You can easily track many of these conversions by spending just a few minutes in Google Analytics I have a great tutorial here on how to set up email signup tracking. Once you’ve done that, you can start analyzing which social networks, blog referrals, and content on your site are sending you the best, aka converting, traffic.

Referral sources

There are many great reasons to find out which of your fellow bloggers are sending you great traffic. This opens up a great line of communication to discuss additional partnership opportunities. By promoting them, you may be able to get a few more mentions on their site. To find your referrals and where they are referring you within their content, take a look at your Google Analytics

1. acquisition
2. All traffic
3. propaganda
4. Set your secondary dimension as full referrer

You will probably see several social media networks here. Ignore them for now. You want to find blog posts from other bloggers. Export the list if you need to.

Once you know which posts around the web are sending you the most traffic, and if you’re tracking newsletter signups or sales, promote these posts. Put them on your social media sharing schedule. Pin them to your boards The more they are shared on the web, the more traffic they get. The more traffic they get, the more traffic you get.

open rate

When it comes to your email newsletter list, size doesn’t count at all. If none of your 10,000 subscribers open your email, who cares? The numbers you want to look at in your newsletter service are open rate and click-through rate You want your subscribers to open your emails and take the desired action you are taking.

If you see that your open rate is less than stellar, Most industries have an average open rate of 20-25%., try to work in your subject line. Another great way to get more people to open your emails is to offer subscriber-only content in your newsletters. It doesn’t have to be anything difficult. You can simply share some helpful links from the web or some tips of your own

When analyzing your blog statistics, you need to know where you are coming from and where you are going. Get yourself a great spreadsheet to track your results and goals. On the first of every month, sit down to write down your income and last month’s figures. Compare this with the previous month’s numbers and establish a marketing strategy and what you want to work on in the upcoming month.