How to leverage stats for your blog

When you start a blog for your business, you’re putting time and effort into another marketing channel. As for any other investment, you should monitor the return you’re getting – with a blog, this return could mean growing your reader base and increasing your brand exposure, or selling your product or service as a result of your blog, or generating revenue from ads that you’re displaying on it. No matter what your goal is, the best way to monitor your return is to analyse your blog’s statistics. These will give you information such as:
How many people are visiting your blog
How many people are arriving at your blog but then leaving again
The average amount of time people spend on your blog
Where your readers are coming from
If your readers come from a search engine, what search phrases they used to arrive at your site
Which posts they read
Armed with this knowledge, you can get a clear picture of the audience that is reading your blog and what content is most useful to them.
Most major blogging tools such as WordPress and Blogger provide basic blog statistics. If you’re looking for more extensive analysis, such as returns on ads you’re displaying on your blog, you’re better off using an external tool. One of the best free tools available is Google Analytics, which you can access using your Google log-in (if you already have one) at www.google.com/analytics. Like most statistics packages, Google Analytics provides you with custom tracking code that you’ll need to include on the pages of the blog that you want to track. With a blog’s template structure, tracking the whole blog is easy – you simply paste the code into the part of the template that is common to all the pages of your site. Doing this also means that new content will be tracked without your needing to add the tracking code to the new page of content each time. Once the code has been included on your blog, visitor activity is tracked and translated into the statistics you see in the Google Analytics reporting interface.