What I Learned From My Analytics

Blog analytics are interesting because blogs tend to be simple and so the analytics don’t require you to write code and understand GetQueryParam. You can learn quickly.

I run four kinds of web analytics on my blog, when you include FeedBurner (although I am still waiting for Google Analytics) and these are some of the things I have learned:

1) No one subscribed to the FeedBlitz email subscription, which was how I enabled individuals to read my blog in their email instead of RSS or going to the blogsite itself. Since no one cared, and since I was always incorrectly using that email field to search my blog instead of using the Technorati field, I ditched that service.

2) My most important referrer this month was the StatCounter forum. I wrote a post about them a week or two ago, and then cross-posted to it on their forum. I got immediate traffic, and then when the conversation became slightly controversial, I continued to get traffic. Now, if I were writing about another company with a forum, I would always know to cross post or trackback so that I could get that traffic.

3) My website continues to be my most important referrer, over time, to my blog, and vice versa. There is no “to do” here, it is just a nice verification to have.

4) My two top posts this month for my blogsite (i.e. among newsstand readers) are the post about Matt Belkin (where I take all the credit for his post) and the original Statcounter post. However, among those who subscribe to feeds, the most-read post is, not surprisingly, How do you convert feed readers? There is a great lesson here about writing for one’s audience.

5) I can see that when people comment, they rarely come back to the conversation because I don’t have comment trackback. So I am thinking about pulling the code from a site like co.mments, into my blog template and thereby make it easier for commentators to watch the conversation.

Robbin
LunaMetrics