How do you find your blog analytics? How can you use them to blog more efficiently and drive more traffic to your site? Read more about How and Why to Get Your Website Statistics
For YEARS I didn’t dig very deep into my website analytics (statistics on which of my posts got the most traffic, and where my traffic was coming from). But as my Blogging Goals Changed, I decided to start paying attention.
By Paying More Attention to My Website Statistics I:
Learned which of my posts were resonating with readers
Learned where my traffic was coming from – what devices, what social media sites, and what websites
Was able to get MANY more page views on my site with the exact same effort
In other posts I will talk about different insights I gleaned from keeping an eye on my blog stats, but in this post I want to explain how to find your blog or website analytics in the first place.
Here’s how to see your website statistics on Blogger:
Congratulations! If you are on Blogger, you don’t have to do anything to see your stats. Just go to your main dashboard and click on Stats:
You’ll be able to see how many views your latest post got and how many views your site overall got in the last week. (Note: these are the stats for my old blog, so it gets almost no views.)
If you click More About This Blog in orange under the name of your blog, you will see where your traffic is coming from.
If you click More on Google Analytics way down at the bottom of the More About This Blog page, you can see ALL your analytics, some of which I’ll talk about in future posts.
How to see your blog statistics on WordPress:
WordPress is always a little more challenging. I’m not a WordPress expert, but what I did was:
- Set up a Google Analytics account
- Claimed my website by installing a code snippet
- Typed my Google UA Number into a plug-in so I can see stats on my WordPress Dashboard.
This article, How To Add Google Analytics to WordPress in 5 Minutes or Less (ha!) explains the process more clearly than I probably could. But I did it all by myself. If you paid someone to set up your WordPress site, you should talk to them about the best ways to see your state.
I use the Exact Metrics plug-in (formerly Google Analytics Dashboard for WP) to see stats right on my WordPress Dashboard.
I like quickly glancing at my stats every time I log in – and I will tell you why in another post.
If I want dig deep into ALL the stats, then I can go to the Google Analytics website.
That’s it – once you can find your stats and start to pay attention to them, my posts will make a lot more sense.