Blogger is one of the fastest and easiest ways to get blogging but one of its main problems for serious use has been the lack of any Analytics for measuring traffic and visitors. Well now there are two ways to get your Analytics info so you can start keeping tabs on who is visiting and what they are reading. One shows you stats from within the main Blogger cockpit and the other gives you a tracking code so you can link directly into your Google Analytics reports.

Analytics is especially important if you’ve integrated your Blogger blog into your own website, because it’s important to be able to see how visitors arrive at your blog and why and how they are clicking through to the pages of your main site.

So, on to the two alternatives:

1. To check out Blogger’s own Analytics page, find the Stats tab in the Settings page. You’ll see page views and traffic sources such as referring websites and search keywords used to find your blog. What you won’t see is detailed analysis of navigation, time on page, exit rates, etc. More importantly (in my opinion) you can’t see how readers are clicking through to your main website (if you have one)

2. You can now add your Google Analytics tracking codes to your Blogger blog. If you’ve integrated your blog into your main website, you can use the same tracking code and will now be able to see detailed Analytics for your blog and website combined. This is great because you’ll now be able to see how people read your blog posts and how they click through to your main website pages. Plus you get all the detailed analytics data that’s missing in alternative 1 above.

If I’ve convinced you that option 2 is worthwhile, there’s a nice tutorial here on adding Google Analytics to Blogger

Note it’s very wise to back up your blogger template. Also because you’ll be editing the template code itself, you’ll need to be careful of any layout designs you’ve created using the template designer.

Photo by brockvicky under the CreativeCommons license on Flickr

Or, put another way, how much would you pay?

This isn’t a test, just something to think about. If your answer is ‘nothing’ and you use Twitter to market your small business website, then read on…

Hopefully you already have lots of followers and they read and retweet your tweets (if you’re not sure about this then it’s time to start measuring these). A percentage of these people should turn into leads by direct messaging you or by visiting your website and triggering your conversion goals (again, if this concept is confusing, by all means ask for help)

How valuable are those Twitter leads? If you lost those leads what would that cost your business?

So now how much would you pay for Twitter? The sensible answer here would have to be ‘less than the value of the leads it brings you’ – but definitely more than nothing.

Again, this isn’t a test, but it is intended to help you think about whether you’re getting real value from Twitter as a marketing channel for your website. If after all these questions you still think it’s worthless then it might be worth re-thinking your tweeting (or your tracking, or your website and products).

PS. I wonder how many people out of the 0% used Twitter actively for business promotion?

More interesting articles:

Squeeze Your Twitter Lists

Are Your Tweets Search-Engine Friendly?

Firstly, don’t panic. It doesn’t mean your traffic has actually dropped – it’s just that these different tools use different methods to measure your traffic. Logfile analyzers like AwStats look at the actual activity on your server and track the downloads of every single file – full pages, images, PDFs, scripts and so on. Google Analytics uses a tiny piece of Javascript on each page and tracks opens of full pages from visitors browsers.

Here are some factors that can make the results from these systems different:

• Robots (like Googlebot) don’t run Javascript so these visits won’t show up in Google Analytics
• Browsers cache website pages (i.e. keep a local copy on the computer) so they don’t always have to download pages that visitors read often. If this happens the web page view won’t show up at all on a log file (AwStats). Google Analytics can track the page view though because it runs on the browser
• Some browsers have Javascript disabled so Google won’t track any website visits
• Some visitors will have security software that stops Google working

There are pros and cons to each approach and I won’t confuse you with the detail (leave a comment or ask me if you’d like an explanation though!)

The basic message is that Google Analytics probably will show you a smaller number of visitors (maybe even a lot smaller). Many of these missed visits will be from automatic bots that are out there on the net crawling and indexing your site. You probably shouldn’t really care about them anyway, unless you’re worried about your site being indexed.

If you want some proof of this, take a look at a log file from a typical day of activity. Your internet host should provide these for you. Take a look through for robots (try a search for ‘bot’) – you may be surprised how often these visits happen.

One of the most common questions I get from people with small business websites (especially blogs) is “what should I write about?” They know that one of the keys to a successful website is to include lots of high-value content, but struggle to find ideas for new topics. Well, here’s a way to get some great ideas. It’s free, the answers are only a couple of clicks away and they use a nice thing called ‘time on site’…

Why is This Useful?

If you own a small business website then you need to spend your marketing time wisely and this includes time spent creating new content for your website. Rather than guessing at new ideas for content, this technique uses clues that are already there in your website traffic.

Analytics First

The key to this technique is to use the visitor analytics results for your website. If you don’t have analytics already running, you’ll need to install this first and run it for a decent slice of time – probably at least a couple of weeks. Google Analytics is very popular and works well, so I’ll use this as an example.

To install Google Analytics for your site, just head over to www.google.com/analytics and register your site. You’ll need to grab the tracking code and add it to each web page.

What to Look For

You can use the keyword traffic report as inspiration for new content. Just look under Traffic Sources -> Keywords. Take a look down the list of keywords and look for ones which match these criteria:

1. They bring you a decent number of visits already (definitely more than 1)
2. Average time on site is low (probably zero)
3. They’re relevant to your business and your website

The image above shows the ‘time on site’ column in Google Analytics.

OK, so why are these numbers important?

It’s because these keywords are already bringing you some organic search traffic (from Google, bing, etc) but your visitors aren’t finding what they want on your pages.

You might find that these are long tail keywords, and the phrases may not appear word-for-word in your pages. You’ll probably find that the pages where they appear aren’t really focusing on these keywords as a topic. Remember that visitors scan your pages very quickly and may move away if the search term doesn’t appear in the title, or early in the page.

What to Do Next

So now you have some ideas for new keywords and topics to write about. Create some new pages around these keywords, and make sure the pages really are focused around these terms. Use the keywords in the title, and several times in the page content (and as near to the top of the page as possible)

Other Questions and Ideas

Can you use bounce rate too? It depends. Bounce rate shows the number of visitors to a page who exit your site as soon as they’ve read it. You might think that a high bounce rate shows a bad page, but for some websites it’s probably fine. Blogs are a good example of this – your readers probably come to your site to read a new post, and then move away to their next favorite blog.

So what about keywords that are already successful for your site? Maybe you have some of these – lots of visitors AND they spend a long time on your pages (i.e. time on site is high). By all means write some more content around these keywords. This comes under the heading of ‘improving what works already’, which I fully support. You should  see more growth if you target the poorly-performing keywords though.

You might also see the time reported as ‘time on page’ instead of time on site. This is just the page-specific version.

Wrapping It Up

So there you go. This is a nice technique for finding new stuff to write about, and it takes away the guesswork. If you’re a small business website owner I think you’ll find this useful. Have a go and let me know if it works – you can leave a comment below or contact me directly.

[UPDATE: I got a few questions on the 'zero time on site' measurement. How can a visitor get to your site and spend zero seconds here? The answer lies in the way Google Analytics measures time on site. It looks at the time between the first page view on your site and the last page view. If only one page is looked at, there is no second page view so a zero is recorded. Visitors may be spending some time on the page, but this isn't recorded. ]

Other articles tagged with analytics

• I don’t have the time
• Too many ideas/techniques to choose from
• I’m scared of making a mistake, or making my site worse

OK. These are all valid reasons. We’ve all been there. I’ll let you into a little secret though:

You are in the best position you could ever be to improve your website.

Does this surprise you? Probably. Here’s why it’s true though:

• You own your website, so you can change anything you like
• It’s all electronic, so you can change it any time
• You own all of your site analytics, so you can measure what’s working
• if you keep backups, you can correct any mistake (you do keep backups, don’t you?)

So really, with this in mind, is there really any excuse for NOT having a go? What do you have to lose?

Consider how your situation would be if you were trying to fix a different kind of product. Maybe a book. Making changes to a printed publication can be difficult and time consuming. As a website owner you are in a much better position than this.

It’s not hard to make changes. The difficult bit is deciding what to change, and then having the willpower to measure the results, compare them to previous results, and then either keep the change or try something else. None of these steps are hard though.

It could be something as simple as changing the anchor text in a key link. You’d be surprised how such a little change can have a big impact on your website results.

Just make sure you keep the original files, so you can backtrack if things get worse. It can happen, but this is all part of the improvement process.

OK. No more excuses. What can you change on your website today?

Part of the answer is to check in with your affiliate (or their provider) and look at your impressions, clicks and sales. But this is only part of the answer.

To get the complete picture you need to use your web analytics tool to track some key things on your site:

1. Page views on the pages with the affiliate links
2. How visitors navigated to these pages
3. Clicks on the links through to the affiliate sites

Why do you need to check these too? I knew you’d ask.

Page views should be approximately the same as the impressions reported by your affiliate. Hopefully your affiliate will report a higher number of impressions as visitors return to their site with the same cookie set. It certainly should not be less – this could be a sign that your tracking code is wrong

Navigation to these pages is useful to know because you want to know where visitors come from and which referrers are working for you. Your web analytics tool should be able to show which is the most successful, whether it’s organic search (Google etc) or direct referrers.

It’s good to start tracking the clicks out of your site. If you don’t track them they will just be reported as exits by your web analytics system. This will give you a terrible click through rate and make your efforts seem worthless! You can add tracking to your outbound links using Javascript onclick functions, or you can insert your own gateway pages that have their own tracking code.

If you can get started with these metrics then you can start to really understand your traffic and what it is doing for you.

Otherwise you’re just working in the dark…