How to use your blog stats to blog successfully:
Your blog site statistics should be a primary driver of your blog marketing efforts and topic ideas. Looking at your stats month after month, you’ll likely start to see a trend among top posts and pages, top referrers (sites that drive traffic to your blog), trending search terms, and clicks. In order to manage these statistics and visualize trends, create a spreadsheet in Excel. Each month, create a new page in this document that illustrates each category of statistics.
Once you have a few months of stat sheets, you can start looking for trends in your stats.
Below is a description of what each metric category means and how to analyze the trends you see:
Top Posts & Pages: Whether you want to check out the top posts from the past seven days, the past 30 days, or even the past year, you can do so through your blog stats. Here you’ll see which posts were the most frequented in a given time period and how many visitors viewed those specific posts during that time period.
For example, if you want to compare the best articles and pages for November to those for December, you can do so by looking at your Excel spreadsheet and comparing each month. You may find that a particular topic is more popular than others, which means that you will want to keep writing about that hot topic. For topics that seem to be lacking in visitors, based on your stats, you’ll want to reduce the number of posts you write around that topic.
Top Referrers: Referrers are platforms that send traffic to your blog. You may find that month after month you receive the most traffic (referrers) to your site from Twitter. Or maybe you’ll see that Facebook is the primary driver of traffic. Whatever the trend, it is obvious that you are getting results from one specific action that you keep taking month after month. Boost your efforts on the platforms that have historically brought you the most traffic. Focusing on the platforms that continue to produce the desired result is the most effective and efficient way to spend your time and effort.
Search Engine Terms: These are the terms people have typed into search engines to find your blog. Take note of the terms people use to find you and see which keywords and phrases are the most popular. You may want to consider using these terms in other articles or writing more articles specifically around popular search terms.
For example, let’s say you wrote an article about the origins of beer. You notice that people search for “origins of beer”, “beer tasting” and “origins of beer”. If that sounds like a popular search term, consider writing another beer article.
Clicks: The number of clicks your readers make on your posts is measured in your stats, and you can see which links have generated the most traffic. For example, if you see that a specific hypertext keyword continues to be clicked on in your posts, consider adding that keyword to several of your posts and linking to it.