A lot of you probably have set new goals for your blog with the new year, right?  Maybe you want a new layout, or you’re going to participate in a new meme, or you want to expand the reach of your blog.  Each of these goals takes time and effort, so you’ll want to see the payoff of all your hard work.  But, how do you measure the results?

Alongside your own level of personal satisfaction, understanding your blog stats can be a great way to measure the impact of improvements you make to your blog. But, stats can be difficult to decipher, and culling out the valuable information is sometimes a chore.  Here’s a quick primer on blog stats.

How Do I see My Stats?

If you are running on a free platform like WordPress.com or Blogspot (aka Blogger), your stats are built into your blog dashboard.  If you are running a self-hosted site, your host provider likely provides a stat interface like AWstats or Webalizer.  Probably the most commonly used site stats tool for  self-hosted blogs is Google Analytics, which is what I primarily use.

Unfortunately, each of these methods breaks stats down in different ways and formats, so we won’t give a specific tutorial on moving through your stats interface here, BUT, let’s talk about some of the most standard statistics that you’ll want to track on your site.

• Daily Visits – This is usually the easiest stat to see when you get into your stats interface.  It’s useful because you can see which days had more visitors, and hopefully, correlate an increase in visitors with something you did on your blog, like writing a fantastic post, or linking to your blog from Facebook.
  
• Unique Visitors – This is the number of different people (computers) that access your site.  Usually we track this on a monthly basis.  If your number of “uniques” is going up, you’re getting more people coming to your site! You can increase your unique visitors every month by utilizing SEO techniques and/or by promoting your blog on social networking platforms.
• Visits – This is different from unique visits in that it counts the number of times that your site has been accessed. So, if your Mama visits your site every day for a month, she counts as one unique visitor, but she’s given you 30 ticks on your visits stat. Ultimately, you want your “uniques” to come back to your site over and over.  The best way to do that is to give them a reason to come back!
• Page Views – This is how many pages have been viewed by your visitors.  So, if your mom comes to your site and just looks at the newest post, that’s one page view.  But, if she clicks around on your archives, topics, bio, etc…your page views will go up. Easy ways to up your page views are to put links by post category in your sidebar, or to link to your own related posts in each post you write (Like I just did in the two bullet points above).
• Bounce Rate – The bounce rate is the percent of visitors who come into your site and then leave your site without clicking on anything.  For bloggers, this number is usually pretty high because our newest content is usually on the first page that visitors get to, so they don’t need to go anywhere else to find what they are looking for.  However, a lower bounce rate means that your visitors are interacting more with your site, and that’s definitely a good thing!

What About that Alexa Chick?

You may or may not have heard of Alexa, which is another form of site ranking. Alexa ranks websites based on a number of components, including number of visitors, geographic reach, and the number of websites that link in to your blog. You can get your site’s Alexa rank at Alexa.com.  Or, you can download the Alexa tool bar, which enables you to not only see your own site’s Alexa rank, but also the ranking of every site you visit.

Why Do I Care?

As I mentioned, stats are a good way to get feedback on how the work you do on your blog is paying off.  If you want to work with companies or other PR efforts, the folks you will be working with will likely want to know the key components I listed above.

That said, don’t get too tied up in your stats.  Spend some time in your stats interface to learn how it works and where to find the data that is important to you, and then mark your calendar to check it every week or two.  Unless you are in the middle of a major campaign or change on your blog, there’s no reason to check your stats daily, and you’ll end up wasting a lot of time. Also, unless you are trying to make a business out of your blog, don’t put too much weight in your stats.  Remember what your purpose for blogging is in the first place, and use your blog stats to help you meet your goals.

If you have specific questions about anything related to blog statistics, please leave them in the comments and we will do our best to answer them!  (If you’re wondering about something, there are probably several other bloggers who are too!)

This post was written by Fawn, ARWB Managing Editor and blogger at Instead of the Dishes.