Blog analysis: the most important figures for your blog

After you’ve signed up to the analysis tool, you are faced with many different figures, diagrams, and values: getting to grips with it all can be difficult. So where do you start with the blog analysis? Which numbers are relevant to your blog and how should you interpret the values? The traffic figures are a good place to start.

Users (unique visitors)

The number of unique visitors is an important factor for blog analysis because this figure reveals how many people the blog has reached. Google uses cookies to identify users, but this can still lead to stat­ist­ic­al in­ac­curacies, for example, if two people are using the same computer they will be counted as one unique visitor. Ad­di­tion­ally, many visitors use an­onymisa­tion tools which assign the visitor a new IP address every time they access a page.

A blog with many visitors is no guarantee of a suc­cess­ful blog – a thousand clicks on the homepage are mean­ing­less if the user dis­ap­pears after a few seconds. It is therefore worth­while to take further user behaviour in­dic­at­ors into account.

Pages per visit

This value indicates the average number of pages that a user visits during their session. Be careful with how you interpret this value: if it’s par­tic­u­larly low it can also mean that you have a lot of regulars who just read the most current blog post during their session and then leave the site. With the analysis tool it is also possible to set values for new users ex­clus­ively. If new users continue to leave your blog after accessing just one page, you could try to keep them in­ter­ested in your site by linking to ad­di­tion­al articles or related topics at the end of the blog post.

Average session duration/retention time

This value indicates the average time a user stays on the site and from this you can work out whether they find suf­fi­ciently in­ter­est­ing content. Retention is a unique quality factor which Google also takes into account. By im­ple­ment­ing an internal search function, tools, or image galleries as well as dis­play­ing similar articles, you can increase retention time. A heat map can help you to un­der­stand the user better since it provides click and scroll behaviour in a graphical rep­res­ent­a­tion.

Bounce rate

The bounce rate reveals how many visitors view just one page on the blog and then leave. This figure is again relative since regular readers have already read old posts and generally just access the newest content. Users who find the answer to their query in one of your articles, will leave the site re­l­at­ively quickly so a high bounce rate doesn’t have to be a negative. Nev­er­the­less you should try to keep the reader on your site by linking to relevant content on other pages of your blog.

How can you tell whether a reader is a regular visitor to your blog or stumbled across your blog from a search query? Analysis tools help you make the important dis­tinc­tion by providing in­form­a­tion on traffic sources and ac­quis­i­tion paths. When breaking down where readers come from, Google Analytics dis­tin­guishes between:

• Organic search: users that arrive on your site through an organic search on Google, Bing, or another search engine.
• Referral: visitors that arrive on the blog by clicking a link on another website – a high rate means a good backlink profile.
• Social: users that found their way onto your site through social media e.g. through Facebook, Twitter, or Instagram.
• Direct: users that typed in the blog’s address directly or have it set as a bookmark – these are usually regulars.
• E-mail: users that found the site from links in e-mails or news­let­ters.
• Other: users that arrive from other sources, such as their own RSS feed.

These website analysis in­dic­at­ors are es­pe­cially important since blog operators can ac­cur­ately see where their potential lies and which channels are par­tic­u­larly important for reaching readers. From the values, you can see where you need to invest more time and money.

Under the ‘behaviour’ section, you can learn more about the pop­ular­ity of your website content. If you filter by page views, for example, you can view your most popular texts. But take into account that a post from two years ago is more likely to have more clicks than one that was posted a few days ago. Thus, the re­la­tion­ship between time and the amount of views is crucial. If you take this into account, you can use the ranking of the blog analysis to get a better feel for content that is par­tic­u­larly popular. Whether an article is read es­pe­cially fre­quently or not, often depends on its topic. The headline, an exciting in­tro­duc­tion, or a par­tic­u­larly appealing image can also make a dif­fer­ence. Ad­di­tion­al programs can provide a more detailed analysis of in­di­vidu­al posts. WordPress users can make use of the plugin Google Analytics Dashboard by Analytify. You can also use Google Trends to research topics for new articles depending on current trends.

Social media platforms can become powerful tools. It takes just a few hours for a post, image, or video to spread around the world, with the creator barely having to lift a finger. Every blogger should therefore keep their readers’ activity in mind when carrying out a regular blog analysis. Facebook, Twitter, and other social media platforms offer their own analysis tools, which you can use to follow your blog-related social media activ­it­ies. The stat­ist­ics of a Facebook fan page provide in­form­a­tion on how far a blog post reaches, how high the in­ter­ac­tion is, and the resulting number of clicks on the website over time.

With Google Analytics, you get a deeper insight into how in­flu­en­tial your social media channels are on your read­er­ship and how much they con­trib­ute to the success of your blog. The ‘Ac­quis­i­tion’ tab lets your track which social media channels bring your readers to the blog. By clicking on the ‘Social Data Hub’ tab, you can see how your blog comes across on social networks, which means how often it is mentioned and shared, and responses to the content. If you embed social plugins (buttons that the user clicks on to like or share articles) into your blog, you can track any activity through Google Analytics.

Remember that those sub­scrib­ing to news­let­ters and RSS feeds are also an important source of traffic and should not be neglected in the blog analysis, because they can be excellent in­dic­at­ors of read­er­ship loyalty. A news­let­ter sub­scriber is often more valuable than a Facebook like. This is because the news­let­ter rep­res­ents a direct channel to the reader, unlike the Facebook like (which the reader may have clicked simply to enter a com­pet­i­tion). In order to measure and analyse the number of sub­scribers, there are separate analysis tools such as Feed­burn­er from Google, while it is also possible to analyse each news­let­ter provider.

Tools like Google Analytics or Piwik are also used by large global companies – the range of functions can initially be a bit over­whelm­ing for a simple blog. After you’ve fa­mil­i­ar­ised yourself, you will know how to correctly interpret the in­dic­at­ors and - thanks to the blog analysis - make your content even more appealing to your readers.