If you want to run a blog with any degree of seriousness higher than simply plopping down your thoughts and sending it out the the ethereal world of the internet (which is basically how I'm going to run this blog), then you'll want to know about the viewers of your blog.
Blogger does offer some data analyzing capabilities of who is viewing your blog, when and what they are seeing.
That's a good start, but you'll also want to know stuff like, how long do people stay, how many visits are from people coming back to your blog and how many pages does my average visitor look at?
All these questions can be answered by Google Analytics.
Setting up is *fairly* easy.
You register an account (you can just use your Google account) and then tell Google what website you want it to track.
There is the slightly tricky and very scary (for coding virgins like myself at least) part, where you are asked to open up the HTML code of your blog and inserting a piece of code into the right place.
I expect this is probably no more complicated by HTML coding standards than putting some more gas in your car, but if you've never seen HTML code before it does feel a bit like you're doing open heart surgery.
Once the tracking code is in place in your blog, then Analytics will start picking up info about visitors dropping by and you can get an idea about if people just pass by your site, or if they actually spend several minutes reading your golden nuggets of entertaining and informing blog wisdom.
Another service that I also think you should sign up for right away is Feedburner.
Your blog will have "feed" that people can sign up to, which is basically showing your posts in a feed reader of their choice.
This is another way that people could be reading your posts, but without them actually coming into your site.
Naturally you want to see if you have a lot of feed subscribers, and by signing up your feed with Feedburner you can see stuff like this, so you know how many views and clicks your posts are getting on your feed.
It's even easier to sign up for Feedburner than Analytics. Again you can just use your Google account, and if you're using Blogger it can just plug straight in and you don't have to do anything.
These simple tools will actually provide very valuable info about your audience, which you can then use to tailor your content.
No comments:
Post a Comment