Stats Tutorial Part 6 – Top Posts & Pages and Clicks
For the last few weeks we’ve been talking about stats. If you are just joining us now, you might want to check out the previous posts as follows:
Part 1: Introduction & how to put stats collection in place
Part 2: Information on stats collection
Part 3: Google Analytics & Jetpack Stats
Part 4: Time on site and bounce rates
Part 5: Are your readers mobile? And where does your traffic come from?
Today we are going to talk about the last bits of information that we can get from WordPress stats – Top Posts & Pages and Clicks
Looking at the upper right of the Jetpack Stats widget you will see a box labeled Top Posts & Pages. This will help you understand where people start their reading journey on your blog. It is likely that a large number of the entries are for “Home page/Archives.” That means that people have clicked on your direct URL to get to your site. If they have clicked on a direct link to a specific blog post from a FB post or a Twitter link you will see that indicated by numbers beside specific posts. Not only can you use this to find out what are your most popular posts – and give your readers more of similar content – you can also make generalizations about starting points on your blog.
As an example, on my business blog I created a blog post with screenshot walking people through the process of adding Amazon affiliate links to their blog posts. This post is almost 2 years old, but it gets at least one hit every day – and most days it gets 20 or 30 hits.
Lastly, the box further down on the right is labeled Clicks. This area tells you what has been clicked on, on your site and how many times. As I mentioned in the post on Affiliate links, stats can tell you clicks on buy links, but only affiliate links can tell you clicks vs sales. If you have things you want your readers to click on that aren’t sales links, your Clicks section will help you understand that type of traffic. For example, I have a link to my site – The Book Blogger List on most sites that I manage. I’m interested in how many times that link is clicked on.
Let’s conclude this section of Stats with some final thoughts. Stats should help you understand a lot about your blog and your readers’ behavior. I hope that you use it to make changes where necessary to your site or to your content. I also hope that you take all the information that you gather with a grain of salt and sense of humor. Although I know that I could spend hours analyzing the stats for my sites, I don’t. And I don’t suggest you do either. Use them as a tool to guide you but not as an obsession to occupy time that you should be writing!
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I’ve now re-worked and republished the four of my books. They were written in hopes of helping authors and bloggers. If they sound interesting, click on the covers and you will be taken to Amazon. For those of you who have been following along, The Book Blogger Platform was published a short time ago. In other news, I handed ‘Blogging for Authors’ in to my editor on Friday – hopefully that title will be out on Amazon as soon as possible!
Stay tuned for news.
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