Posted on August 19, 2009 by H W in Blogging
There are a few options in tracking traffic to your blog, and you can employ one of them, or all of them, if you choose. The most popular is Google Analytics (click here). Create an account and click on “Add Website Profile.” Type in the url of your web site (www.MyDomain.com) and click “Finish.” Google Analytics will generate code that you will paste into the “Footer” of your blog.To do that, login to your blog (www.MyDomain.com/wp-admin), and then click on “Appearance” on the left hand navigation bar. Click on “Editor,” which will take you to your theme’s files. Click on footer.php and then paste the code from Google Analytics into the document. Save it and that’s it! Google Analytics will start tracking such information as the amount of unique visitors to your site, the keywords they are using to find your site, where in the world they are coming from and which articles they are clicking most frequently, among other useful things that will help you get to know your audience better.You can also set up Google Analytics to send you a report on a regular basis – daily, weekly, monthly – whatever. We recommend weekly so that you have enough data to compare. Remeber that it will take a while for the code to start tracking traffic, so don’t expect much from your graphs for about a month.Another useful traffic tracker – although much younger than Google Analytics since it launched in 2006 – is Quantcast.com. This service actually tells you if your audience is mostly male or mostly female; whether or not they are educated – how?“The service analyzes your traffic by using the actual data your site generates, based on certain check points. You can learn about your traffic’s demographics, as provided by advertisers, ad networks, ISPS and publishers. It then comes up with an analysis of traffic rankings of millions of websites (20 million and counting).”Does this make sense to the average blogger? Probably not. But like most things, there is a learning curve involved, and once you start reading traffic spreadsheets, you may even become addicted to comparing and contrasting their daily fluctuations. Yeah – there is a little bit of nerd in everyone, so embrace it as closely as the subject about which you blog everyday.Tags: advertisers, audience, blog, blogger, demographics, google, graphs, hand navigation bar, isps, learning curve, left hand navigation bar, profile type, publishers, traffic rankings, unique visitors
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