The majority of bloggers track how many people visit their blog each day which is a nice number to know if you are only interested in the quantity of traffic your blog gets. For those of you interested in improving the quality of traffic that comes to your blog, here are seven stats you should be keeping an eye on.
Referrals
Your link referral stats will show you how visitors found your website. When someone clicks on your link from another site, such as a search engine, a good traffic stat program will log the url of the website your visitor came from.
With this stat you can see who’s linking to your website. If the visitor came from a search engine such as Yahoo or Google, the referral will also log what keywords the person typed in which will help you in your search engine marketing.
You can also catch copyright thieves simply by including links to other pages on your website in your articles. Most content thieves are too lazy to strip out links in the articles they steal so you should investigate any referral links you do not recognize to make sure no one is using your material without your permission.
Returning Visitors
Getting a lot of traffic is great but how many people return for more of your content? Your returning visitor stat will give you an idea of the true size of your audience. It is normal for this number to fluctuate slightly during the life of your website but you should take note of any sharp declines as this typically signals a problem.
Bounce Rate
The bounce rate is a measurement of how many people visit your blog and leave without visiting any other pages on the site. While there is no industry standard for this rate, it goes without saying that the lower the better. If your bounce rate is particularly high that means there is a problem. That problem can be a design issue (broken or missing links) or a content issue (people are just not interested in what you are writing about).
Visit Length
Along the same vein as the bounce rate, how long are people hanging around your site? It’s great if you are getting 1000 hits a day but all that traffic is really not doing you any good if people are only hanging around for 10 seconds or less.
In addition to writing interesting content be sure to link to other content in your blog to tempt visitors to stay around a bit longer.
Pages Visited
Most stat programs will track where people are going on your website and list the most visited pages. This is good to know because if you are getting a fair amount of traffic on a particular article you can increase traffic by expanding on the topic.
Exit Links
Some stat programs will track what links people are clicking to leave your site. This can help you help you keep track of whether or not the ads you have set up are in an effective place.
Screen Resolution
This is more for design considerations than anything else. If most of your visitors are using a 1024 x 768 size screen and your website is designed for an 800 x 600 size screen, you can think about redesigning for the higher resolution and using that extra space. This also works in reverse. If most people are using a smaller screen, you can redesign the site so that the visitors are getting the full experience of your website.
While knowing how many people are visiting your site is important, knowing what they are doing once they get there will go a long way in helping you manage and market your blog effectively.
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