Teaching Blog 101: 5-Minute Analytics Check-up
 Photo by Squidish Unless your education blog is your sole source of income, spending more than 5-10 minutes analyzing your analytics each week can be unnecessary. Analytics, or the stats on your blog, will give you an idea of how many people have seen your blog, what they have looked at, and how they got there. Why is that important? It is important, because if you want your blog traffic to increase, you have to figure out how people are finding your blog and what they are looking it. Let’s delve deeper and create a plan for a 5-Minute Analytics Check-Up. Step 1: Check Your Pageviews vs. Visits Pageviews are, in a nutshell, how many pages have been clicked on during the day, week, month, or year. If you see other bloggers talking about how many pageviews they have, they are referring to that number. It can be easily found in your Google Analytics* reports or even on your blog host’s analytics. The more pageviews your site has, the more attractive it becomes to advertisers. Visits are how many people have actually come to your site over a given period of time. Depending on your Pages/Visit ratio, your visits could be a lot less than your actual pageviews. Step 2: Find Out Which Articles Have Been the Most Popular You know that you have had 1,000 pageviews this week, but what were people looking at? To find that information you need to check the “content” analytics. Some built-in analytics, such as on WordPress, give you access to that type of information right from your control panel or dashboard. For analytics trackers like Google Analytics, you will need to scroll down to the “Content” tab, click on “Overview”, and then click on “Page Title” located under the statistics on the right. That will tell you the titles that were the most popular during the specified time period. Step 3: Look at Your Traffic Sources You know how many visitors you have had, you know what they have looked at, and now it is time to determine where they came from. Again, built-in analytics should be able to provide you with that information from your Dashboard or Control Panel. In Google Analytics, the traffic sources can be found under “Traffic Sources” and “Overview” in the left-hand column. You will then see a pie chart telling you how much traffic came from search, referral, direct, and campaign traffic. Another key piece to this information is the “Keyword” column on the right-hand side. It lists the keywords that people searched for that landed them on your blog. You may find that, over time, your blog will yield consistent traffic from one or two specific keywords. You can either capitalize on those keywords and provide even more content surrounding them, or you can try to capture other searches by writing more about other things. For the average education blogger who is more interested in creating content and advertising their own education products, the three key pieces of information above will help bring focus, clarity, and direction to your blogging. More serious bloggers, or those who are dedicated to making money with their blog, will need to delve deeper into the demographics, behavior, and conversions to give them the detailed information that they need. No matter what you use your blog for or how often you use it, it is a good idea to spend at least 5-minutes each week taking a look at your blog analytics.
*Resources Installing Google Analytics on WordPress blogs Installing Google Analytics on Blogger
Thank you so much for joining us for the Teaching Blog 101 Series on The Teachers’ Lounge! You can find all of the information, from starting a blog to analytics, by checking out the articles below. As always, if you have any problems or need help, please do not hesitate to email us at TeachersLounge@ReallyGoodStuff.com. We cannot wait to see your education blog!
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Commented On June 2nd, 2012 9:21 am
Great information and very helpful to those of us who are considering starting a blog! THank you!