7 Traffic Stats You Should Know About Your Blog Or Website

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Chances are, when you started your blog or website, you had no clue about page views, bounce rates, unique visitors or what those numbers would mean to you. That's understandable. But unless you pay a techie to manage your website, sooner or later you'll want to know the things about your site that those numbers can tell you. In today's post, I'll cut through the clutter and share my own personal views of what numbers you need to know about your site and why they are important to you.



I know that there will be some webmasters who really get into this stuff that will say, "Are you nuts? How can you not include XYZ stats in your list?" I get that. Personally, I get into the stats thing more than I really should and I follow some pretty obscure numbers. But while I see some value in other stats, these are the ones that I would want to know as a bare minimum to help me understand how my site is performing and what areas I need to focus on to make it perform better. That said, here are the top 7 traffic stats that I think you should know about your blog or website and why.





1. Unique Visitors- When you start to follow the stats of your site, you'll see a kazillion stats that measure visitors, each reflecting a nuanced measurement of the people who visit your site: visitors, unique visitors, visits, new visitor, returning visitor, and the list goes on and on. I like to look at unique visitors when I study my stats because it tells me how many individuals have visited my site during a specific time range. If you were throwing a party, this number would tell you how many people showed up.



The reason this is important is that you can get a feel for the number of people interacting with your site at any given time. And remember, just because 1000 people visit your site from time to time, they will not all visit on the same day. You may average 200 unique visitors per day, but some will visit every day, while others will visit once a week.



2. Percentage Of New Visits- This stat tells you how many of your visitors have not been on your site before. I know that this number is not 100% accurate for a lot of reasons, but it will still give you an idea of whether new people are finding your site or if your site is primarily being visited by the same people over and over. 



The reason this is important is that you'll have an idea of whether your site is growing or dying. If the percentage of new visits starts to decline, then you'll know you have to work on marketing your site more to make sure new people are finding it. This is one of my favorite stats to monitor on my site.



3. Page Views- There are a lot of nuanced ways you can also measure page views, but most tracking tools use this stat to tell you how many times your html page has been requested to load. It's also often called an impression. So, on my blog, if you click on 4 posts to read, my stats counts that as 4 page views (this is a simplistic explanation of what really has a more technical answer).



The reason this is important is because it lets you know how robust your website traffic is... to an extent. If your site has 20,000 page views per month, then you know how many times a page on your site has been clicked. This is an important number that advertisers use to determine how much an ad should cost on a website, though by no means the only number.



4. Page Views Per Visits- This stat tells you, on average, how deep into your site visitors go. Do they look at just one page and then move on to another site or do they click through to other pages on your site. If you have 1000 visits and 1500 page views, then you're averaging 1.5 page views per visit.



This is an important number to watch. If it goes down, that may be an indication that you're not positioning your information in a way to encourage people to click other links on your blog. It may also be that you're not presenting them with other information they think is useful. On the other hand, it that number goes up, it's an indication that your site is doing a good job at making interesting information easy to find on your site.



5. Bounce Rate- Bounce rate measure how many people come to your site and then leave without clicking on anything else. On my blog, someone may come over because of a tweet, but if they read the post and then go back to Twitter, then it's a bounce. However, once they're here, if they see another post that looks interesting and they click on it, then it's not a bounce. So, if 100 people come to my blog and 38 of them go to Google after reading the post while the other 62 read another post on my blog, my bounce rate would be 38%.



The reason this is important is that it gives you an indication of how "sticky" your blog is. By providing good information to your visitors and making that information easy to find, you'll increase your "stickiness" and decrease your bounce rate.



6. Time On Site- This stat tells you how long people spent on your site before clicking away. If someone came in from Google and spent 10 seconds on your site before going back to Google, chances are they realized that your site wasn't what they were looking for. However, if you have posts, audio, or video on your site that people find interesting and valuable, they will spend more time on the site to see what you're saying.



The reason this is important is that it can tell you how engaging your content is. If you're getting 2000 people in from Google, but they are only staying 10 seconds, then you know that they are not finding what they are looking for. But the more they click around and explore, the more time they will spend on your site.



7. Traffic Source- This stat tells you where your visitors are coming from. You may have 30% coming from Twitter, 15% coming from Google, 23% coming from my blog, and 20% coming from StumbleUpon. By keeping an eye on your traffic sources, you'll start to get a feel on what's working and what's not working in your marketing plan.



The reason this is important is that you'll know where you might be spinning your wheels and you can focus more on developing new traffic sources or fortifying the sources that are working for you already.



This is a simplistic look at what can be a very detailed study. But for the author who doesn't want to become a webmaster but still wants to understand enough about their traffic to make good marketing decisions, these 7 traffic stats are a great place to start. Once you understand these, then you can look at the other fun stats, like entrance/exit pages, geotargeting stats, loyalty, regency, depth of visits, and on and on. While there are many places to find these stats, Google Analytics is one of my favorite. It's robust on its reporting and it's free.





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 -------- Tony Eldridge is the author of The Samson Effect , an action/adventure novel that Clive Cussler calls a "first rate thriller brimming with intrigue and adventure." He is also the author of the Twitter marketing book, Conducting Effective Twitter Contests .