As I am sure some of you are already aware, I work in marketing. I have now worked in marketing for over a decade, and I just love it. During that time, I have worked my ladder to be the top of my field already before the age of 30. I got here by dedicated hell of a lot of my time to improving my skills and keeping up with the latest trends. One of the biggest things that I have to do in my everyday job is having the ability to monitor online traffic. I run a very successful e-commerce website and in order to monitor and improve that site, I need to know and understand what metrics I am looking at. So, for this post, I am going to share how I analyse my blog traffic.
Take a look at the general metrics.
One thing that you must set up on your blog or website is a way to monitor your metrics. The most popular and in my opinion the easiest to use is Google Analytics. Simply add a code to your website and then it takes care of the rest. If you are wanting to get an improvement plan in place, you need to be monitoring visitors, sessions, bounce rate, page duration and acquisition. These are the basic metrics that will give you an indication on if your site is growing, staying the same or on the decrease. There are other programmes on the market now, but Google Analytics is free and easy to use.
Â
Where does the traffic come from?
As well as monitoring the figures on your site, you need to closely monitor where the traffic comes from. This tends to be broken down into a couple avenues, organic, referral, direct, social and paid. I am sure that during your time blogging, you will have heard many people harping on about improving your organic traffic and that is so important. However, you need to have a full picture. Are you incredible on social and get 80% of your traffic from there? Are other people linking to your site and are you increasing in the referrals. These things are all so important to monitor, so that you know how to move forward.
Â
By analysing the traffic, how can I get quick growth?
The main reason why I want to advocate understanding your traffic is because it can help you grow. After a duration of time of monitoring my site, I knew a couple key things that were worth noting. The first thing was that most of my traffic in the early days came from referral. This is because I was incredibly active at commenting on other blogs and being social. This was a winner for me and I knew that I had to continue doing this. The next thing was that I knew my traffic soared on a weekend. From there, I increased my frequency of posting on a weekend so that it reached more people. There are many things that you can do from here.
Â
Are there any trends in the data?
The final thing that I want to mention in this post is are there any trends? When you look at your metrics, is there anything in there that jumps out at you? For example, is your traffic substantially lower on a weekend? Are there seasonal changes? Do you get more views in the winter months than the summer? Do big launches influence your traffic levels. By analysing these things and then pre-empting them, you can begin to get a plan in place for tackling the issues. Personally for my blog, I find that I get more views in the winter months (excluding the Christmas break). During fashion weeks my views soar through the roof.
I hope that you guys liked this blog post. As I mentioned, one of the biggest things to expanding your site/blog comes down to analysing your traffic. By doing this, you know what is going well, what needs to improve and where your efforts needs to be. I will continue to share my blogging tips here on my little platform. Hopefully it will allow you guys to become a little more independent and knowledgeable about your sites. As always, I would love to hear from you below. Let me know if you currently monitor your blog traffic? Is there anything that you would like to know? I am more than happy to help in any way that I can, so please leave me a comment below.
