As you may know, yesterday was my final installment of the Blogging 101 series and I covered the topic of monetizing your blog in a variety of ways. So, today I thought I should spend some time talking about the importance of tracking your analytics to help you understand your blog’s audience and reach! There are two points that I would like to make on the subject, the first is that you should be tracking analytics on your site, and the second is that the tracking system you should be using is Google Analytics!
To the first point, if you have a blog, you should be using analytics tracking. These systems are incredibly helpful and can give you a variety of information about your audience, their behavior on your website and which posts are driving views and which posts are duds. If your blog is small, you may not think analytics are important to focus on while you are growing your blog, but you would be surprised by the insights you can get in your analytic reports. Let’s be honest, when we publish posts, we really have no clue how the post is going to fare. I often write this long elaborate posts that I am sure will be popular and then when I check my analytics I find that it wasn’t attracting as many eyes as I would have hoped. Sometimes as content creators, we don’t know what will be popular unless you have been blogging and writing for a decent amount of time, but heck, I have been at this for years and I still have figured out the magic formula! So, it’s important for me to check my analytics, see what is doing well and what is not so I can spend more time creating content that my readers want and not waste my time on a piece that I may find interesting, but perhaps my audience does not. That’s not to say that I think we as bloggers need to ignore what we like to write about, but when you are serious about growing your blog and your audience, you have to focus on what works and finding unique and creative ways to package your content in ways that continue to surprise and delight your readers! Analytics can tell you so much about your audience as well, not just what posts are popular. You can find out where the majority of your audience lives (this is super helpful for figuring out times when you publish your posts), you can find out their age and gender (which is sometimes a very interesting thing to know if you are attracting more male or female readers than you expected based on your content so that you can either create more for those audience members or perhaps refocus your content to attract the reader you have in mind) and of course analytics helps you track how long people spend on your site and your page views (which is a necessary piece of information if you are looking to monetize your blog).
So, now that you know why analytics are important, lets talk about which analytics service you should be using. I’ll be honest, the reason I am writing this post is because I recently needed to switch over to Google Analytics and I wanted to make sure that others were using it because it is the industry standard when it comes to analytics. For years I have been using a different site to track my analytics, but now that my blog is growing and I am thinking seriously about monetization, I am finding that sponsors, marketers and affiliate networks want to see Google Analytics information specifically. Google Analytics is free, so thats a bonus, and it does give you an array of options that didn’t exist with my previous analytics system. I really wish I had jumped on the Google Analytics bandwagon earlier and because of my situation, I wanted to let you all know that you should seriously consider using it as well if you have no current analytics tracking or if you are using a different site. Analytics are one of those things that if you pay attention to, they can help you learn and grow your site, but if you don’t pay attention to them, its still good to have a system in place in case the day ever comes when you need the information.