Analytics are described by Search Engine City as: “Technology that helps analyze the performance of a website or online marketing campaign.” In my opinion, analytics is not just: “How many people visited my blog?” The way you view and use analytics definitely will dictate your success as an online publisher. This is an important differentiation by the way: some people are “social bloggers” while others are “online publishers.” Social bloggers usually tend toward the social side of posting and usually lack the desire or skills to make money at their posts.
If you are serious about analytics that contain goals for conversion of content into dollars, you need a service like google web analytics. Once registered and set up there, I recommend you go through their series of videos called “Conversion University.” It may be difficult for you and you may feel like a fish out of water but getting through that will show you the “market” of online publishing. In a later post, I will write on “conversion.” It is a complex yet concrete term that every online publisher should know.
Once you sign up for Google Analytics, you’ll need to put the code on your site. I deal with the Wordpress self-hosted platform and highly recommend achieving the Analytics install through the use of the plugin HeFo. This plugin is my best friend in other ways such as when I want to validate a bunch of blogs at once and need to insert temporary code in the header or footer. Without this plugin you need to hard code into the theme and then redo it anytime you change themes. Another way to achieve it through a Wordpress plugin is the Platinum SEO plugin. I also use that one but don’t use it for my codes such as Google Analytics.
Google Analytics in its basic form is free. There are other services out there you can pay for that may be excellent. I recommend “cutting your teeth” on Google Analytics and if you desire more, check into a paid service. Once you start using Google Analytics you will start to know what content is most popular, what your referring sites are, and what keywords are bringing people to your content. You’ll begin to focus less on your ranking from friends who visit you and more on what your readers are clicking and buying and how to increase that. That is the process known in blog analytics as “conversion.”
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Analytics should be something that everybody pays attention to when they run a website or biz, it is what translates into earnings and allows you to learn and adapt.
You got it brother!