Blog Analytics You Should Pay Attention To Every Month

Last updated on July 30th, 2018 at 05:08 am

If you’re a brand new blogger, you may not be familiar with blog Analytics. You might be so excited about starting a blog. You find yourself pumping out article after article.

First of all congratulations on starting a new blog. I personally love my blog. I started it to share my personal experience as well as make the techie side of blogging easy to empower bloggers to start, grow and monetize their own blog.

If you want to read more about my entrepreneurial journey, you can buy my Kindle Book.

I’ll be the first to admit that when I started my blog, I didn’t pay very good attention to the blog Analytics. That’s where I screwed up.

I don’t want you to make the same mistake that I made. So listen up closely and I’m going to show you what blog metrics you should be paying attention to every month.

Don’t Pay Too Much Attention to Stats

There’s a fine line between checking your stats at the end of every month to see the growth of your blog. I think that’s healthy and will help you understand on what you can do to improve your blog growth and get more views.

The worst thing you can do is stress over your stats. If you’re a brand new blogger, the main thing you should focus on is providing the best possible content for your audience.

You also want to make sure that you’re spending time promoting your blog. You can get involved with guest posting, blog commenting, using Pinterest and other marketing methods to get your blog out there.

Don’t waste too much time checking your stats. Remember, you don’t have all day to work on your blog. Instead of checking your stats everyday, spend time working on growing your blog.

Don’t forget to remove yourself from your Analytics so you don’t screw up your stats.

Blog Analytics Are Vital For Growing Your Blog

If you’ve been working on your blog on a regular basis, then you know that it takes a lot of hard work to grow.

You wake up every morning and find yourself doing the same blogging tasks day in day out. Maybe you’re starting to see some results and maybe you’re not.

If you need some inspiration on what it takes to grow a blog, listen to this podcast.

Ask any successful blogger and they will tell you that they spent years doing the same thing over and over.

Just because you’re not starting to see results, doesn’t necessarily mean that your blog isn’t growing.

It Takes Time to Grow A Blog

The truth is that it takes time to grow a blog. Think of it like planting a seed for your vegetable garden. You wake up one day and decide that you want to grow some vegetables.

So you go out and buy some seeds that you can plant.

You come home and plant your new vegetable garden. Every morning or evening you water your seeds.

You’ve done everything you need to do. As long as you continue to water your garden and keep it free from weeds, you’ll start to see your seedlings produce.

Not once do you wonder if your vegetables will grow. You don’t go back and dig up your seeds and say, I’ll just start over.

Yet, when we start a blog, we usually find ourselves wondering if we’re doing things correctly.

We tend to believe that  there is always something that we should be doing better. Maybe you even spend time Googling “how long does it take to grow a blog?”

Some of us even tend to jump to the next shiny object because we think that our blog should be growing faster. It’s so easy to believe that if you just buy this product or that one, you’ll start to see success.

Don’t make the same blogging mistakes that I made. Stay focused on your blogging goals and just keep working.

The Truth Is

It takes time to grow a blog. Chances are you are not doing anything wrong. Don’t let anyone derail you into thinking that you should be bigger than what you are.

As long as you’re treating your blog like a business and working on it everyday. Then over time, you’ll start to see the results from your blog.

Keep Working On Your Blog

Chances are you’re not a full-time blogger yet. Maybe you work a full-time job and are hustling on the side to grow your blog. I am still freelancing on the side while I grow my blog.

So I don’t get to spend 100% of my time on my blog. That’s why I check my blog Analytics on a monthly basis to make sure that what I am doing is actually growing my blog.

If I notice something isn’t working, then I’ll drop that blogging task like a bad habit.

Before You Can Check Your Monthly Stats

The great thing is that you can easily install some code to your self-hosted WordPress blog once and then continue on your merry way.

I’ve written a great tutorial that will show you how to set up Google Analytics on WordPress. If you’re just installing it, you’re going to have to give it time to start providing you some metrics.

However, once you’ve been blogging for a little while, you’re going to have a ton of valuable information you can use to tweak your blog promotion.

While I won’t go in too deep as I am still learning how to use mine. I can tell you what I check inside of my dashboard every month.

I also publish new blog stats update reports every month. My goal is to be as transparent as possible in hopes of helping you grow your blog.

Let’s begin.

Stats You Should Be Paying Attention to Inside of Your Google Analytics

Now I know someone reading this is going to say, you also need to pay attention to this or that.

As I mentioned above, I won’t be covering everything I pay attention to. But I will cover the basics of what I think is important.

These are the same things that I pay attention to as I continue working on growing my blog. As your blog continues to grow and you get more comfortable, then you can start paying attention to more stuff.

Audience Tab

Go to Audience >> Overview

We all want page views, most of us would love to have page views in the hundreds of thousands.

I know that some people will tell you that page views don’t matter. The truth is that without page views, no one is visiting your blog or buying your products.

Yes I know you want targeted page views. But the truth is that most new bloggers are just looking for their first blog visitors.

I’ve personally found that it’s a lot harder than we think it’s going to be. We work and work and get so excited when we see someone on our blog.

To tell you the truth, you shouldn’t be so focused on just page views. Instead, you should be focused on finding your true fans.

Every month I check the following in my Audience tab.

Page Views: This will show me how many page views my blog got for the month.

While I like to look at what my bounce rate is for the whole site. I prefer to look and see what it is for each individual page later on.

This will give me a much more accurate picture of what I need to fix on my blog. If you don’t understand what I’m talking about yet, I’ll explain it later on.

Of course, you want to make sure that you’re not only focused on page views. It’s important to make sure that you are growing your email list and making the most of your the page views you get.

Acquisition Tab

Go to Acquisition >> Social

This is tab will tell you which social network is sending you the most traffic. Right now Pinterest is my biggest referrer followed by Facebook.

This means that my time is best spent learning the ins and outs of those networks.

I still post on the other networks like Twitter, but I use SmarterQueue to do that.

Remember if you’re a one woman or one man show, then you need to make the most of your time.

You can’t be everywhere at once, otherwise, you won’t accomplish anything.

Behavior Tab

Go to Behavior >> Site Content >> Landing Pages

This will show you which pages people are landing on when they find your site. You can then see if those pages are optimized correctly.

You’ll also want to see if you’ve taken the time to monetize them. Personally, I prefer to make sure that they have an email opt-in form.

This improves my chance of someone opting in and becoming a subscriber. Which is what the main goal of my blog is.

This is also where I pay attention to the bounce rate of my site. If you look at each individual page on your site, you’ll be able to see what the bounce rate is.

In my opinion, this gives you a much better picture of what people are doing on each individual page.

Let’s take a look

I’ve blurred out my landing pages, I have to keep some stuff private 🙂

You’ll see that I’ve highlighted the bounce rate column. It’s easy to see that there’s a different bounce rate for each individual page.

These are the popular landing pages on my blog. My job is to go to each individual page and see if I can improve them in some way.

One of the first things I like to do is make sure that I have an opt-in for each page. Of course, you’ll notice that I am using Thrive Leads for my site and I have an exit opt-in for all my posts.

This takes some time, but remember, these are the pages that people are landing on your blog.

If you sit down to look at your stats. You’re going to notice that people are visiting the same posts over and over.

I know from my personal experience, I have over 120 published blog posts and people keep visiting the same posts over and over.

What does this tell me? That I need to tweak my blog posts and see if I can piggyback off of my successful posts. If you don’t know anything about Google Analytics, you should start here.

Final Take Away

Growing a blog is hard and takes a lot of the same work day in and day out. Keep doing your daily blogging tasks.

But don’t forget to see what people are doing on your blog. This will help you make some improvements along the way.

The worst thing we can do as bloggers are to just put blinders on and not pay attention to our blog Analytics.

Hand Picked Articles for You

• My Weekly Blogging Duties What I’m Doing to Grow My Blog
• The Ultimate Guide to Using Google Analytics
• Advice for New Bloggers to Help You Keep Blogging

Which blog Analtyics do you pay attention to on a monthly basis? Are you using Google Analytics for your blog or are you using something else? Let me know, I’d love to hear what you do.