Comments on: Site Statistics I Care About as a Blogger

By: sambo

sambo — Wed, 02 Apr 2008 12:07:15 +0000

Great article, I always care about my website.

By: Scott Hanselman's Computer Zen - 7 Blogging Statistics Rules - There is Life After Page Views

Wed, 26 Mar 2008 01:08:47 +0000

[...] lot of time analyzing blog traffic. Josh Bancroft wrote a very good article in January about "Site Statistics I Care About as a Blogger" where he talks about the various and sundry statistics that Google Analytics provides and how [...]

By: Kim Pallister

Kim Pallister — Mon, 14 Jan 2008 20:10:36 +0000

More interesting than the ‘trend’ you discuss (which is just average pageviews, or pageviews over time), is the differntial of that. i.e. the slope. As a trend, is it going up over time, add I adding readers.

The absolute number serves as more than an egoboost; as an author/blogger, there’s some utility in knowing the size of the audience you are writing for. You may choose different topics or a different way to write about them if you are writing for 5, 50 or 500.

Also, One I struggle with is a better measure of the relationship between pageviews and feed subscribers. How many people clicked through and why? How many of the subscribers that I have are also visitors, or is there no overlap between those two sets? etc, etc. Some people use partial/snippet feeds to force people to click through so they get a better measure, but this is a crappy approach.

Maybe google analytics does a better job? This may be an artifact of my using feedburner and sitemeter separately. I dunno.

By: Scott Edwards

Scott Edwards — Thu, 10 Jan 2008 18:01:55 +0000

Great article. As one who is seriously considering taking a leap to becoming a serious blogger, this excellent info. I have more questions if you don’t mind. I blog idea is for industrial engineers (an area I think is missing in the blogosphere) and if possible, I’d really like to monetize it. In your experience, what range of traffic do you need to generate income? With your traffic levels, are you generating income? I get the sense that you don’t really care about that but then again, you wouldn’t have adsense. I guess it never hurts! By the way, I’m one of your cherished subsribers (Bloglines) and a fellow Intelite. Feel free to e-mail me if you choose to respond to my quesions but don’t want to show more “unmentionables”.

By: Josh Bancroft

Josh Bancroft — Thu, 10 Jan 2008 17:51:52 +0000

@Stevelle - I left new vs. returning out because, since most of my traffic comes from search engines, it’s always a very high percentage (like 90+) of new visitors, and it doesn’t change very often, even over long periods of time. Not very interesting to me, but in general, I definitely think it’s a metric to look at, to get an idea of how much return traffic you’re getting.

@ahockley Mint is definitely awesome. I bought it, and used it on TinyScreenfuls for a long time. I got rid of it last year, when I was trying to troubleshoot web/database performance issues on my old webhost (1and1), and switched to Google Analytics. Then, GA just kept improving and improving to the point where I really like it now, and I don’t have a real reason to go back to Mint. But it’s definitely a tool a stats geek should be familiar with!

By: Aaron B. Hockley

Aaron B. Hockley — Thu, 10 Jan 2008 02:22:09 +0000

Good analysis, and I didn’t seen anything to argue with you about I use Mint for stats on a couple of my blogs and I love the way that many of the stats are quickly (one click) filterable by recent dates… so if I have a spike in traffic it’s very easy to isolate the source, as well as to look at what’s been popular lately.

And yes, like you, I find the subscriber number is a good count of overall performance. Since launching VanPortlander I’ve been pleased to watch that number slowly and steadily creep up by a few each week. I must be doing something right.

By: Stevelle

Stevelle — Thu, 10 Jan 2008 01:58:56 +0000

I’m somewhat surprised you didn’t mention the “New vs Returning” report, filed under Visitors within Google Analytics.

By: Natz G

Natz G — Thu, 10 Jan 2008 00:10:09 +0000

Hi there! Nice article Although I’ve had a blog for a while (like 2 years or so), I’ve never really been serious about it. And in fact where it was hosted didn’t provide any stats anyway. I have just moved to WordPress and I think the stats are great! And I’d agree, the most flattering stat would have to be those folk who has added you to their readers!

By: Dorion

Dorion — Wed, 31 Dec 1969 16:00:00 +0000

roundup of statsthat matter to bloggers with Google Analytics screen shots and meaningful context. The comments are helpful too. Highly recommended. Technorati Tags: Stats, Bloggers, Blogging

By: Officially Lucky, a blog by Clint Ecker

Officially Lucky, a blog by Clint Ecker — Wed, 31 Dec 1969 16:00:00 +0000

Analytics junkies Filed under Marketing, Social Networking, Technology 2008 January 09 My friend, super-blogger, and fellow Arsian, Josh Bancroft has a really keen post abouthow he tracks the various metrics of his personal blog(which gets quite a good bit of traffic!). I will admit it too, I am an analytics junkie too and I use a lot of the same metrics and tools as Josh does to see what content is doing good and where I can make improvements on my