What stats do you need to understand for your website: Part 2
Welcome back!
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Last week I started a series of posts to help you understand all the numbers available for your website or blog. My authors are often offput by the sheer overwhelm of information so I’m hoping to break this down into normal English in a way that everyone can follow.
Let’s start part 2 with a series of definitions.
Referrers – is the referring source of the traffic to your website. It may be Facebook or Twitter, it may be another author’s website, it may be a blogger’s website. We want to keep track of friends and we want to know if actions on social media are sending visitors to our website.
Top Posts & Pages – is the list of the top (usually) 10 blog posts or pages that visitors are viewing
Clicks – this section lets you know what visitors to your website click on.
Location – where your visitors are located geographically. This may not be where you think.
Technology – what device are your visitors using to view your website.
Time on site – from start to finish, how long, on average, are your visitors staying on your website. The longer the better!
I’ll share some screenshots below that explain where to find each piece of information.
Let’s start with Jetpack Stats and screenshots from a WordPress.com account. If you have a WordPress.org site, scroll further down for applicable screenshots for you and your site. There are slight differences between what is seen on WordPress.com and WordPress.org sites as I’ll explain below.
On WordPress.com either look to your dashboard or look for the label of “Stats” on the left-hand side of your dashboard.
The initial view typically shows a bar graph of visitors for each day for a month. It can be adjusted to show this information by month or year also. There are summaries at the bottom of the graph.
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Scrolling down below this area, you’ll be able to see the Post & Pages section, Search terms (which we ignore), and Countries. WordPress.com allows you to initially see about 7 or 8 top posts and pages – WordPress.org allows you to see usually 10. If you click on the sideways arrow you can see (and I suggest doing this) a larger block of time – 7 days, 30 days, etc. Numbers are always more meaningful when looked at over a longer time frame.
The box labeled Countries will give you a snapshot of where your visitors are from – again, click on the side arrow to see a variety of time periods.
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The next section (seen in the screenshot below) to direct your attention to is “Clicks.” This lists items on your site that people have clicked on – such as buy links for your books or clicks on your social media icons.
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The section below Clicks is Referrers. “Referrers” is the section that will list where visitors start their journey to find you. This may be a Search Engine, it may be Facebook or it may be another blog or website. Like above, click on the sideways arrow to see a larger selection of results.
For this section on WordPress.com, what should you pay attention to and why?
Most will focus on the number of hits or visitors a site gets. To a large degree, that doesn’t concern me. I certainly want to see action on a site. However, I’m more interested in what visitors do during their visit? What do they click on? Where did they come from?
Keeping that in mind, let’s go back over the available information. Top Posts & Pages will let you know what your audience is interested in reading. This will give you hints of what to give them more of. Referrers will let you know where your visitors come from. If you are active on Facebook, do a lot of your visitors to your website come from Facebook? Do they follow links from other sites to find you? These little details allow you to better target where your promotions are located. The section on Clicks will help you understand what visitors are interested in finding out more about. Your books should be for sale and you should be able to see clicks on buy links. If you encourage visitors to follow you on Facebook, you should be able to see clicks on the Facebook link, etc. Conversely, if you don’t see any clicks on buy links – why not?
WordPress.org
Let’s move on to WordPress.org. Most of the same information exists on WordPress.com can be found on WordPress.org except for the map.
Because there are small differences between .com and .org versions of Jetpack we’ll walk through a new selection of screenshots.
Looking at the screenshot below you will see the top section of the display shows not only a bar graph but some totals below – such as Best Ever and numbers from the life of the website – interesting, but not something we pay attention to. As I’ve said before, lovely to know how many people visit our site, but more interesting to see what they do when they are there, etc.
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Scroll down below the bar graph and you’ll see the section in the screenshot below – made up of Referrers, Search Engine Terms, and Top Posts & Pages.
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As with the description for the .com version, Referrers tells you where your traffic is coming from – great for identifying the effectiveness of a Facebook promotion for example. Search Engine Terms can be entertaining, but Google no longer allows us much information about the search terms people use when searching for us. Because of this, I generally suggest ignoring this section.
To the right in the above screenshot is a selection of Top Posts & Pages. As described previously, this is a list of the top content your visitors are interested in. By clicking on Summaries, you can see a more extensive selection of results. As explained previously, you get an idea of what type of content your readers are interested in and provide more similar information.
Scroll further down and you’ll see the section depicted in the screenshot below:
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Clicks will let you know what people are clicking on. This will give you an idea of some of the actions your visitors are taking during their time on your site.
I’ll draw this blog post to a close by hoping you learned something new today! Next week’s post will cover Google Analytics.
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The post What stats do you need to understand for your website: Part 2 appeared first on Bakerview Consulting.
