Immediately after you publish and promote an article, visitors from all over the world will start coming to your blog. This is a very exciting moment. It’s important, however, to fully understand the traffic figures from your web analytics suite as well as to keep track of them over time.
Analyzing statistics is particularly important because you should strive to take an Agile/Lean approach to blogging. When you try something out—a new type of article, a new style of headline, changes to the layout, anything really—you need to validate your hypothesis. You assume that a change (or perhaps a new article) will be welcome and ultimately end up improving your blog, but you don’t know for sure until you try it out and verify the results.
8.1
Baseline vs. Spike Traffic
The immediate flow of traffic you receive upon releasing and publicizing a new post will appear in your statistics as a noticeable spike. If you publish once a week on the same weekday, for example, you’ll notice a more or less constant amount of traffic (i.e., your average traffic, or baseline) and then a jump around the day your new posts usually go live.
As you can see in Figure 19, A traffic spike, on page 147, the effect lasts for a few days. This spike will eventually disappear from your charts, but the baseline of traffic you receive should increase slightly in the long run as a result of it. Every post you add to your blog will contribute to the ongoing growth in the average amount of traffic you receive without any further effort on your part.
If I were to quit blogging for six months, I would still receive a great deal of baseline traffic every day, thanks to my wealth of existing articles. People will
Not everything that counts can be counted, and not everything that can be counted counts.
find such posts through search engines, links from other blogs, social media citations, and so on.
Of course, ceasing to blog would cause the average number of visitors per day to slowly but surely go down over time. More importantly, my feed sub- scribers would probably begin to vanish as well as they begin to notice that I haven’t published anything for months.
To grow your baseline, keep adding spikes with new posts. Think of it as adding logs to a fire to keep the flames roaring.
8.2
Key Site Usage Metrics You Need to Consider
Traffic is a generic term. Let’s get more specific and consider some of the most
common metrics used to describe the amount of visitors you receive. (This section also acts as a nonalphabetized glossary.)
• Visits: The total number of times your site has been visited by all your visitors. If the same visitor comes back to your site multiple times over a given timeframe, all of these visits will be counted. A visit corresponds to the duration of a session. The session is started when the user arrives on your site and ends when the user closes the tab/browser or is inactive for a certain amount of time. (In the case of Google Analytics, that’s thirty minutes by default, but this number can be customized.)
• Unique visitors: The total number of visitors who arrived on your site, excluding duplicates. Unlike visits, this figure ignores multiple visits by the same visitor over a time period. This value is an approximation due to the fact that the uniqueness of a visitor is determined via cookies, which can obviously be cleared from time to time.
• Pageviews: The number of times your pages have been loaded. If ten vis- itors visit your site five times each, and each of them browses two pages per visit, your pageview count will be 100 (i.e., 10 x 5 x 2). If the same visitor reloads a page multiple times, each of those refreshes will be added to the counter.
• Average pageviews: The ratio between your pageviews and your visits. This roughly indicates how many pages are viewed on average each time someone visits your site. If your average pageview count is 3.0, it means that, on average, people come to your site, see that page, and then explore another two pages before leaving.
Figure 19—A traffic spike
• Time on site: The average amount of time spent on the site by your visitors. This, too, is a very approximate figure, because leaving a window or tab open will influence this value, even though the user may not necessarily be reading or engaging with the site in any active capacity.
• Bounce rate: The percentage of visits that lead to a single pageview. It’s a measure of how many visitors leave after landing somewhere on your site directly from that page versus those who stay and explore other pages before leaving. This number can vary wildly from one analytics suite to another.
• New visits: The percentage of visits from new visitors versus visitors who have already visited your site within a given time frame.
The exact implementation of these concepts by your web analytics tool will affect the numbers you see. Google Analytics’ figures are generally accepted as a standard of sorts in the industry.
A good analytics solution will show you these site usage details as well as plenty more about the profiles of your visitors (network, country, language), their browser profiles, your site’s traffic sources, which search engine keywords were used, and so on. You can learn a lot about your visitors by taking a look at these less frequently used metrics from time to time.
8.3
Interpret Visit Quantity and Quality
It’s important to regularly keep an eye on your site’s usage stats. Some of these will tell you how good a job you are doing in attracting visitors to your site. Others will give you a glimpse of how satisfied your visitors are likely to be with what you’re providing them.
Visits, unique visitors, and pageviews are visit quantity metrics. Average pageviews, time on site, bounce rate, and new visits are visit quality indicators. Generally speaking, people pay attention to visit quantity but very little to visit quality. If you were to express the popularity of your site to other people, Interpret Visit Quantity and Quality
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147you would normally list pageviews and visitors. But do not ignore visit quality parameters. They can give you equally important information about your visitors’ behavior.