Do You Know Who is Reading Your Blog?
You can’t be serious about making a blog if you have no intention of tracking the readership of your blog. You cannot measure your blog success solely on the number of comments you get because the majority of people are too shy to comment. Page views and site visits are the most essential metrics for assessing your blogs success.
My favourite tracking tool, and probably the best one out there currently, is the free Google Analytics. Unlike the dodgey SiteMeter used by many in the Omani blogosphere, Google Analytics does not require you to put a graphic on your blog and does not publish those statistics to the public. For example, you can Muscati’s traffic summary here.
Unlike the messy and confusing SiteMeter, Google Analytics is a fine tracking solution that provides many detailed tracking metrics – Those are divided into the following categories:
- Visitor Metrics (number of visits, pages views, geographical location, etc.)
- Traffic Sources Metrics (what websites link to you, what keywords were people searching for when they found you, etc.)
- Content Metrics (what is your most popular content, traffic pathway, etc.)
All of these are displayed in an easy to use rich interface powered by Flash and Ajax, which is easy to use and very interactive. My favourite feature of Analytics is the comparison tools for comparing progress over a month or any other period of time which shows numbers and percentages of growth.
Installing Analytics is dead easy, you simply copy the code and paste it at the bottom or you template, I think that you can even just paste it as a code widget in the Blogger and place it in the bottom of the page.
