I recently had someone ask me on twitter how I know which parts of my blog are performing and which are not. My simple answer to the question was, tracking. I’m sure you have heard all about the importance of tracking, and knowing the specific statistics of your site. If you haven’t however, let me take a moment to say: It is extremely important that you track everything!
While there are a number of ways to do this efficiently, the best and easiest tool you can use is Google Analytics. This is what I use and I highly recommend you implement it today. In order to use this service you will need to set up a Google Adwords account. Now you may not use it to run ad campaigns, however Google requires you to load at least $5 in order to open your account. It’s a small price to pay to get the amount of tools you do with this service. So go ahead and get your account all set up and ready to go. Once you have that out of the way, you can click on the tab that says Analytics to add your site url.
Then, look for the link that says “create new website profile”, add you site url, and click finish. This will generate a piece of code that you will need to put into html of your site somewhere before the tag. That’s as hard as it gets! Now your ready to track your results.
There is so much that you can do here that I recommend you take the time to fully familiarize yourself with the site. Some of the stats that I find most helpful are the sources that generated unique visitors, the bounce rate, most visited pages, and the referring keywords. There are a number of other statistics as well, but these are just my favorites. So by all means, use it to its full capacity.
All of the information that you gather from these statistics should help you to find out what works and what doesn’t so that you can get your site running at the optimum capacity. I’m positive you can boost your traffic by tweaking those things that are holding you back. I wish you the best of luck in all you do, and hope to see your site at the top of the rankings!
