Blog Analytics

As we discussed in a previous post, when creating your blog you want to make sure that you keep track of your reader and website hits on your blog.  The analyzing the traffic is sometimes referred to as analytics.

The tool you decide to use to track your blog analytics should track the location on your readers, the time the spend on your site as well as how they enter the site.  This information is very important if you are trying to figure out what is drawing people to your site.  Once you find out what people like the simplest way to keep them is to give them more of what they like.  For instance if your blog is about widgets and you see that most of your traffic is coming in from a post about Widget 123 it may be best for you to do additional posts about this particular model.  You could also put a link to this post on the blog's home page.  Let's review a couple of tools.

Stats:
This tool is built directly into the Blogger platform.  You can use it by selecting stats from the menu options in Blogger.  The tool includes easy to read map that shows the location of the user.  Stats gives real time statistics that display page views.

Mint:
The cost of Mint is $30 per website.  The installation is very simple and it returns the normal statistics:  Search, page views, and visit details.

Inbound Writer:
Inbound Writer is a free tool that provides extensive details.  It also gives you the general analytic results.

Overall you need to try a few different tools to see which ones you like best.  They all return similar information so it is basically a matter of preference. Here is a list of 20 tools to get you started.