Stats Tutorial Part 3
Last week we talked about stats programs that can be used to measure the visitors to our blogs. You’ll remember that I share videos to help put Google Analytics in place and I also recommended using Jetpack if you have access to it.
The two stats programs I recommend have their strengths and are very similar in many ways. I use Google Analytics to look at where my audience is coming from (geographical location), time spent on blog, bounce rate and what type of device my readers use to access my site. I use Jetpack for everything else.
Let’s start with Google Analytics. At first glance, Google Analytics is an overwhelming collection of numbers and percentages. That’s why I focus on a small number of figures – I find that I don’t get overwhelmed with information that I either don’t care about, or can’t use, that way. When you go to your Google Analytics dashboard you are presented with an overview of a week’s worth or a month’s worth of summary numbers. Where we are going to start our discussion is the geographical location. To find those numbers, look on the left side of your screen for Geo and click on the arrow to expand the section and then click on Location.
I’m very interested in where my audience is physically located. I think that the normal reaction with blogs is that our audience is likely from our own country. Because our site is available on the Internet, it is open to the world. You might be surprised to find that a large percentage of your hits come from a different country that the one you live in. I know that India and the various Oriental countries are considered emerging markets for bloggers. I have one blog that has almost 50% of its traffic from India.
Why do we care where our audience is from? The first reason would be to help us understand who are readers are, and secondly to help us focus promotions of various sorts. Let’s use my blog that has a lot of it’s audience from India. If I want to do a Facebook ad that targets my demographic but don’t include India in the choices, I may not be targeting my readers. Likewise, if I want to expand the reach of my blog using a FB ad, I can include countries that I know I don’t have much of a readership in.
Let’s use the example of a giveaway. Since I live in Canada, I’m frequently excluded from a lot of giveaways and other promotions so this is a topic that is dear to my heart. If I know that the majority of my audience is from other countries than the US and offer a giveaway that excludes all countries but the US, am I going to alienate my readers? Something to think about.
I think that’s enough to look at for today. Next week we will be moving on to talk about time spent on your site as well as the bounce rate. Remember all those people telling you how long your posts should be? Are your long posts actually being read?
More on that next week!
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