Wednesday, December 29, 2010

How's Your Status?

How many of you out there check your stats for your blog on a weekly, or even daily basis?

How many of you know what it is or where to find the stats? I didn't know for about the first year I was here, I'm embarrassed to say.

When you first go to your blog everyday, you'll start from your Dashboard. You'll see the blue underlined words such as Edit Posts -Comments-Settings-Design – Monetize – Stats. If you click on Stats a new window will come in and your stats will be shown for the week. You can choose a Now, Day, Month, and an All Time button.

The All time button window will give you a good over all graphic of your pageviews. You'll also notice over to the side a column for Pageviews: today, yesterday, last month, and all time history. This is a good thing to look at from time to time. And if you run your arrow over this blue graphic, it gives you the date of these peeks, and pageview counts at each peek. This is a nice feature at blogspot. I don't think anyone else has an easier way of checking your stats in such a detailed way.

Up above the window again printed in blue, you'll see the words Posts, Traffic Sources, Audience.


Audience is where you will be able to check your status on how many people come to your blog on a daily, or weekly, etc. basis,

Posts you will have a different graphic of each of your most popular posts, it shows you the “Pageviews” and its corresponding number, showing you which of your posts have been most popular.

Under Audience you will now have a map of the world, and countries that have come to your post will be shaded in light or dark green. There will be another graphic below this telling you exactly how many people in each listed country who have visited your blog within the time frame you are searching. To the right are Pageviews by Browsers, and also one for Operating Systems. With this do-dad, you know how many people are using Windows, Macintosh or other. Is that cool or what?

Now if you pop over to Traffic Sources you will get a graphic and read out on Referring URL's, and Referring Sites—where people are finding your blog can also be important as well as interesting. One of the sites I've checked out is totally in Russian. Most might be from facebook, google, and blogger. If you belong to another writing community, there will be those among them too. Knowing this helps you when you visit these other sites and help you pull even more readership your way.

Way at the bottom it will show which Search Keywords were used to hit your blog, or post.

Now if you'll notice up above all this, and just under your blog's title are a bunch of tabs with black lettering. By hitting Comments you will get a page of any comments that were ever made.

The great thing about this feature is you can check comments from this page without ever going to your blog at all. If something is there that needs to be deleted, it's better to quickly eliminate it there. Doing all these tasks at the dashboard doesn't add to your own visit totals.

You can use this great blogspot tool to your advantage by learning which posts on your blog have been most popular, and which ones haven't been really too popular helps you ascertain what sort of things to feature at your blog. If something isn't working at all, you know that it's a waste of your time to work on it. If time is in short supply, then this would be a valuable thing for you to keep up on.

I didn't even know this feature was here until three months ago. But it's been helping me, and I can see what has worked for me. For instance, I noticed that as soon as I made the choice of honing my blog toward one or two subjects has greatly helped, and making a decision on Muse's main theme—vampires—has brought in viewers in greater numbers. I saw a huge jump from just a few per month to hundreds per month coming to my blog once I began posting with vampires in mind, whether it was about books, movies, TV, or news having to do with vampires, Dracula, etc, it had worked. My post about a taxi driver being attacked by a “vampire” is still being viewed today, even though I posted it way back in March. My number one all time post has been when I first welcomed Sumiko to my blog. The next most popular ones have been interviews. My interview with Justin Romine, the director of the vampire movie, was right after Welcome Sumiko for popularity. Other interviews followed along with my other posting bud, John of John's Corner of Horror.

Checking your stats at least on a weekly basis, and checking the All time stats helps you determine how well your blog is doing as far as traffic, and post popularity. You don't need to pay a service to do this. You can check how well you're doing all from a mouse click and for free. You'll see exactly what countries are stopping in, and how many from that country. My NeoCounter isn't catching many countries that do stop at my blog. It took months before Japan was added to it. But I'm happy to boast that 35 countries (plus maybe a dozen others), stop by to check something out. And I like watching the flags and names of each country click by on the NeoCounter on my blog.

I hope this has been helpful to you. If this is something that you've never thought of, and are curious, go and check this out. I spend about 5-10 minutes each day checking things at the main one, and once a week I check all of my blogs to see which ones have helped pull people over to Muse from the other four I keep, because I "share" my posts from Muse to the other ones.

3 comments:

  1. I honestly never looked at before today, but it is a very cool tool.

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  2. I love this tool! I noticed it when blogger changed their format and options earlier in the year. It has been a huge help. Thanks for pointing it out for those who might not have known!

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  3. Yep. That's why I've remained here at blogspot. I have one elsewhere and honestly, no other place can I down load pictures or find these sort of marketing tools. If you're trying to get traffic to your blog, this is the place to start to watch it all happen.

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