What is your choice of Analytics? Google/Bing/Yahoo?
Do you use any type of plugin to view the results on your blog? Or do you make use of a Desktop Analytics Application like Polaris or Trakkboard?
The tools are certainly informative but information is like a waterhole to a horse – can you drink it? I have a lot to learn being so early in the game and with so many options, charts and graphs I find myself all a whirl.
I make use of two plugins:
- Google Analytics by Kevin Sylvestr. This plugin adds the required javascript for Google analytics. The plugin supports Google’s asynchronous mode. If you are not self hosted then you can add the Meta Data tag via settings for Google, Bing and Yahoo Analytics.
- Google Analytics Dashboard WordPress Widget by Carson McDonald. Places a graph with some stats on your dashboard. What I like most about this plugin is that it shows a mini graph for each post in the posts list – useful to quickly see the performance of each post.
I do go to Google Analytics most of the time, but not exclusively. Because of the fact that I migrated my blog from being wordpress hosted to self hosted at ourchurch.com I look out for 404 crawl errors (for some reason a number of pictures did not make it through in the export).
I am still trying to understand how things work:
- What is the difference between visits and page views
- Why I don’t see a %change when it is clear that there was
- What is Bounce Rate? is lower better than higher?
- Why the wordpress.com stats plugin does not seem to correlate to Google’s Analytics. Even Sitemeter is different. Maybe I am just interpreting it all wrong. I think the myStat plugin also produced different results – although that seemed to break my blog so I disabled it.
- How to setup goals.
The one this I hope for with Analytics is for it to be more real time (something I thought would be so with Asynchronous mode). Maybe an hourly update. That would make a iPhone or Desktop application more appealing and useful when monitoring this data.
How do you make use of Analytics? Does it guide your strategy for better SEO or just satisfy the numbers game?
The way I understand some of the terminology is as follows:
Visits is the number of times someone goes to your site. Page views are the number of pages they click on while they are there.
Bounce rate is the percentage of people who leave your site without clicking on anything (they bounce right off). so lower is better.
Unique Visits: Amount of people who visit your site
Pageviews: Amount of pages viewed on your website (will always be higher than unique visits)
Bounce Rate: Single page views. If a person visits on post on your blog and leaves immediately after viewing, thats 1 bounce. So if 80 out of 100 visitors visits only 1 post / page that results in a bounce rate of 80%. The other 20% are people who browse around your site then.
Low bounce rate is better because that means that people stay on your site longer and increased time on site counts for pagerank. It’s important to use a related post plugin for this reason.
Interesting post, keep up the good work
.-= RunningWolf´s last blog ..Die Heuwels Fantasties ft. The Soweto Gospel Choir, HHP & JR – Our Heritage (2009) =-.
Thanks, I have only been up and running with Analytics for just over a month, but so far the bounce rate is positive.
My recent post Analytics
Thanks, I have only been up and running with Analytics for just over a month, but so far the bounce rate is positive.
My recent post Analytics
Thanks for that.
What I find strange is the disparity between Page View per Analytic Tools:
Yesterdays stats:
Google: 288
SiteMeter: 132
Wordpress stats: 120
I like Google's answer
My recent post Analytics