Ellen asked:
I use Google Analytics and am looking for a good article on the 3-5 most important things to track. I can get so lost looking at the data and imagining what it means and what to do about it.
Let’s start at some basics and in future posts we can provide some deeper knowledge. (hint, Jeffrey Kishner!)
Blog Traffic
No one wants to answer this question. What kind of traffic do you need to “arrive” as a substantial blog? What would it take to become something like Sasstrology, the number astrology blog on the net?
Different internet gurus sling about page hits, page views, and unique visitors. Most advertisers are looking for unique visitors, actual people, not spyders or bots that are reading your page. From my experience to place as a notable blog, an authoritative source, you need to break the 100 unique visitor per day mark or 3,000 unique visitors per month. Sasstrology on the other hand has nearly 26,000 unique visitors per month.
That being said, the niche for astrology blogging is very small and even blogs with a few hundred page views per month rate on invesp.com.
Bounce Rate
If someone comes to visit you in your home, you’d like them to stay a while, not bounce right in and out the door. Bounce rate measures whether or not people are staying to look at your content.
One website says this about bounce rate
average bounce rates are 30% and anything above 50% is bad and below 20% is awesome.
There is quick disclaimer that every industry is different, so when it comes to an astrology blog, given the diversity of the material out there a higher bounce rate might not be as bad as you might think.
All that being said, if your bounce rate is below 50% you are doing well.
Length of Time on Page
Once some has come to visit, and decided to stay, the next thing to work on is getting them to stay longer. Again this is an advertising metric, but it also is a measure of how engaging your content is. There is huge variable in the length of time on page from website to website and industry to industry.
As you get more into making money from your blog, you will be motivated to add features and items to entice people to linger over your posts. One insightful blogger noted that when she added YouTube videos to a page she got more revenue through clicks on the ads simply because Google paid higher rates to pages that had a longer length of time on the page.
Again, there is no standard here, but if people spend an average of 2:50 minutes you are doing something right to engage your audience.
Well, Miss Beth, How Do You Improve These Measurements?
If there was a magic bullet to improve any of these things someone would have bottled it and made their first billion dollars. The answer lies not in one strategy, but many. Like one of my corporate bosses used to say “Throw enough mud on the wall and something will have to stick.”
So my next post will be “Mud Slinging”
Photo printed under a Creative Commons License as posted on Flickr.
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Beth Turnage authors Astrology Explored as well as being publisher of Astrology Media Press. Beth is available for private consultations. You can contact Beth at starrynightastro@aol.com.
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