Problogger Site Tracking Introduction

By
Lynda Giddens
– Sun July 18, 2010Posted in: Blogging

For the SITSGirls Problogger 31 Days to Build a Better Blog Summer Challenge, prompted by Jennifer of She’s a Fat Chick who provided a wonderful and simple tool in the Stat Tracker Spreadsheet, I’m going to be keeping my site stats and I will update them here weekly so you can follow along. I’ve started a discussion on SITS also, so if you want to come and share, please visit the Site Tracking to Date thread! For those who are new to site statistics, I am also including a brief explanation of what each line on my spreadsheet is tracking exactly!

I’m using Google Documents instead of Excel to keep track of my stats, so I can access them anywhere and anytime!

stats

I’m actually quite pleased with my stats for this blog being actively worked on for less than a full quarter!


Google Analytics Stats

First, you will want to track your weekly stats, not your total stats. To calculate the stats just for that week, there is a date range in the upper right hand corner of the Dashboard (the first page you’re taken to when viewing the report for your site). Just select the start and ending date. I used 07/09 – 07/16.

The very first sub-section is Site Usage and it will give you most of the information you need for this tracking. Some of the explanations used in this article are taken from Google’s help documents. For a comprehensive explanation of all major Google stats, check out their Metrics Definitions

  • Visits is the number of times someone accessed your site that week.
  • Absolute Unique Visits is not in this graph, however if you click on Visitors on the lefthand menu, you’re presented a graph which shows you this statistic. Unique Visits represents the number of unduplicated (counted only once) visitors to your website over the course of a specified time period. A Unique Visitor is determined using cookies.
  • Pageviews are instances of a page being loaded by a browser. Google Analytics logs a pageview each time the tracking code is executed.
  • Average Pageviews is the number of page clicks by an average visitor to your site. The higher the number, the better!
  • Time on Site is also calculated using cookies and tracks exactly that. The total amount of time an average visitor spends on your site before leaving.
  • Bounce Rate is the percentage of single-page visits or visits in which the person left your site from the entrance page. a high bounce rate generally indicates that site entrance pages aren’t relevant to your visitors and your average pageviews will be lower.
  • New Visits is the number of new visits by people who have never been to the site before. This doesn’t really take into account the same person using multiple machines or devices to access your site, but it’s fairly accurate.

Site Tools Stats

This article covers how to track your RSS feeds for Feedburner subscribers. If you don’t have an account, I highly recommend one since they provide so many feed tools for free! To get to your Feed Stats, click on Subscribers in the Feed Stats menu on the left.

Note: There are other sites like feedburner too, but if you don’t want to use them and your provider doesn’t supply statistics to you, here’s a great tutorial on Using Google Analytics to Track Feed Subscribers. If you have any other resources for tracking RSS feeds, please let me know and I’ll add them here and credit you!

  • RSS Subscribers is the number of people pulling in your RSS feed to their feed reader of choice.
  • Email Subscribers can be found toward the middle of this page. This might not be relevant if you haven’t set up email subscription capabilities. To set up email subscription you can click on the Publicize tab and there is an option on the left hand side for Email Subscriptions. There will be code there you can use on your site as well. I like offering people choices, so why not?
  • Website Grade can be found by going to the Website Grader site and putting in your URL. I highly recommend taking the time to read through the report provided. It fully explains how each statistic is calculated and what your score means. It’s a great tool to figure out what you can do to improve your blog! For an example report, you can see mine. The number represents the percentage of sites not as good as yours according to their own algorithm.
  • Blog Grade is another metric derived from the website grader site. It is based on a measurement of the traffic levels to your blog and the number and quality of links pointing at it.
  • Alexa Rank is your traffic rank from Alexa.com. Simply plug in your URL and you’re presented with your profile. Here’s mine as an example. The number represents how many sites are better than yours.

Social Media Stats

These are mostly self-explanatory, but for some I’ll go into why I’m keeping track of them. You probably won’t want to keep track of all these yourself!

  • Twitter Followers are the number of people who follow you Twitter feed.
  • Twitter Grade is derived from the Twitter Grader. It uses a unique algorithm to determine how powerful your profile is. Just plug in your twitter username and it spits out its statistics. Here’s a detailed explanation of how it works, but the short of it is that it’s based on your twitter followers, their twitter grades, how often you update, your follower to following ratio (I try to keep less following than followers), and the number of times people are responding and RTing you among other things.
  • Facebook Fans is the number of fans for your Facebook page. It’s super easy to set one up if you don’t have one. From any page on Facebook (try mine after “Liking” it!), just scroll down the left hand side until you see “Create a Page for My Business”. Don’t worry if you’re not a business! You’ll be guided through the setup process. When it comes to the type of business, select website.
  • Flickr Contacts – Since I’m a photography blogger and I have a lot of weekly interaction on Flickr due to my Friday Finds Weekly Challenge I want to see how my contacts increase throughout this challenge.
  • Friday Finds Group is for my group on Flickr. I recently opened submission for Friday Finds photographs to all, so I want to see how the membership of this group grows in the next month.

07-16-10 - Rose

This has nothing to do with this entry, but I’m a photography blog, remember?

How About You?

Are you keeping track of your stats for this challenge? What unique stats are you tracking and what do you hope they’ll reveal for you by the end of the challenge? Do you have any goals for where you’d like to see your numbers by the end of the 31 days?

Please feel free to respond if you have any questions!

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