Step 6: Monitor your blog traffic

This is part of the series ‘Step-by-step guide to getting started as a food blogger’.

Step 6: Monitor your blog traffic

Monitoring your traffic to see who visits your blog, how they found it and what they do when they are there is vital if you want to understand and attract more visitors.

Some metrics (measures) that you might want to track include:

• Number of unique visits per day
• Total number of page views per day
• Physical location of users
• The times and days your blog gets the most traffic
• User retention – the number of people that return to your site vs the number of new visitors
• Most viewed pages – see which of your pages get the most visits (and which get the least)
• Average number of pages viewed per visit
• Average time spent on the blog per visit
• Keywords used to find your website
• Top sources for visits to your website – including search engines, referrals from other websites, social media (e.g. twitter or facebook), direct access, e-mail and RSS
• Funnels – you can define funnels to identify how many visitors complete a series of steps (e.g. view an item, add it to a shopping cart and purchase it)
• Devices – see what percentage of users access your blog via a mobile phone, tablet, laptop or PC
• The most popular web browsers that visitors are using
• The most popular screen resolutions that visitors are using

This can all seem quite daunting, but luckily all of this information can be easily captured and presented in easy to read formats. Your blogging platform might come with analytics tools built in. If not (or if you want a more powerful solution), we recommend Google Analytics and Woopra – both are free and very easy to set up within most blogging platforms.

Google Analytics

Google Analytics tracks all the data you will ever need, plus it integrates with other products such as Google AdSense and Google AdWords, which means that you get all of your information in one place. It does not report data in real-time, but this isn’t really an issue for most people.

For a quick overview of what Google Analytics is and how it can help you understand your users (and in turn get more visitors to your blog), watch the Google Analytics Product Tour.

Woopra

Woopra is similar to Google Analytics, but its main ‘selling point’ is that it tracks and reporst data in real time. This means that you can watch your users move around your site in real time - this may be useful if you have a live event (such as a conference or live podcast) and you want to see how people interact with your blog while  the live event is in progress.

Another unique feature is that you can select a user and prompt a chat conversation with them (a pop-up will appear within their web browser).

The downside to Woopra does not provide as much information as Google Analytics (although it is still excellent) and it does not integrate with Google Google AdSense or Google AdWords. But if you do want to know what is happening on your website RIGHT NOW, then it is a great tool.

Look at the Woopra Features Overview page for more information on all it has to offer.

Best of both

You can of course use both Google Analytics and Woopra on your blog at the same time.

On GetMeCooking we did use both, but have removed Woopra as we found that it gave a small performance hit as it constantly sends data back from the website to the Woopra servers – and we are speed freaks. Google Analytics does not provide constant communication to the Google servers and is therefore less of a performance hit. Also, although real-time data is nice to have; in most cases it isn’t really that useful.

Getting the tools

To get up and running with Google Analytics or Woopra you will first need to sign up to those services and then import the relevant plugin into your blog. This should be very easy and will be documented on the help pages of the blogging platform that you use.

You can also monitor this information when on the move, using apps from your mobile phone (there are Google Analytics apps and Woopra apps for most smart phones).

Step 7: Set up social sharing (Internet word of mouth)