I just recently was made aware of Google Analytics by Jolanthe over at Homeschool Creations. It is a much better way to track your readership!! After entering your web information it will give you code to put in your site. It will then track your traffic going forward – so do it NOW so you can begin tracking!!
What can you learn?
- How many hits you have in a day
- How many unique visitors you have a day (think 1/3 - 1/2 the number of hits in a day)
- How many pages people look at while on your site
- How long people spend on your site
- Where your traffic comes from?
- Now here is why this is handy! You know the many, many linky Parties that keep popping up? After linking up a couple times go & check if you are actually getting traffic from that linky party. If no one is coming over to read your stuff what’s the point, right? (Again, I’m talking about the point of linking up & not of browsing for ideas =-)
- Smaller Linkies are usually more personal – the host will comment on your post =-) The drawback is if there are only 100 people following that blog, your exposure is pretty limited (even with posting buttons on posts to draw new readers in). I still link up from time-to-time, but none of them made my top 10 referring sites… or even top 20.
- Larger Linkies have the potential to get you a lot of new viewers! You will probably loose the personal touch of comments from the host and not all their readers care about the link-ups. Here are larger linkies that are in my top 10 referring sites:
- Medium Linkies may be the best of both worlds! Most with under 1000 GFC will still comment on your posts (so you know you will at least have one viewer) plus you have more people to possibly gain as followers. Here are the ones that are on my top 10 referring sites. But the way, my TGIF LINKY PARTY would fit in this category =-)
Sometimes you just want to link up lots of places & see what you get. Plus there are other great parties, that didn’t make my top 10 that I still love like The Sunday Showcase & Home plus School = Afterschool. For a list of the parties I visit weekly go here
- What key words people are searching for in Google to find your blog?
- What pages are most popular? (then you know more about your key audience)
- Where are your readers from in the world? I think it is pretty cool how someone in Chile & Russia are both reading my blog! How cool is that? And I’ve just had this Google Analytics in for a little less than a month!! All the countries in green have had someone stop by… the darker green they are the more traffic you get from that country.
Pretty cool, huh! Plus if you are ever hoping to get sponsors or products to sample & review for free they are going to want to know how many unique visitors you have ~ they want to know they are going to get a lot of advertising bang for their buck (so to speak).
Hope this was helpful. I know I learned a lot & enjoy not only making my blog more fine tuned, but also spending my time more wisely!
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