Benj talked about Perception manipulation and statistics. He briefly talks about how numbers can affect visitors on your site. This brings us to something important for your blog – analytics. This involves the the data collected on your website – about your visitors and how they interact with your web pages.
Why is this important? Through analytics tracking, you can determine what browsers visitors are using, what’s their screen resolution, and what operating system they use. You can also determine from what country they came from. For Search Engine Optimization (SEO) purposes, you can find out what ‘keywords’ they used to arrive at your site.
For instance, in my personal blog, I’ve seen that nearly 25% of my visitors use FireFox. I know that 80% came to my site through a Google search. This is important info because I could, for instance, offer my readers more articles about FireFox (which I do). I could find out which keywords they used on Google search and write more articles using phrases related to the keywords. I could potentially increase my traffic!
A couple of months ago, Google announced its purchase of MeasureMaps. From the Google Blog:
Our goal has been to use the power of web analytics to help bloggers feel that same sense of connection with their audience. Today, as the Measure Map team joins Google, our mission remains the same: to build the best possible user experience so people can understand and appreciate the effect their blogs – their words and ideas – can have.
MeasureMap originally was a little snippet of javacript that goes in the bottom of your web page and tracks all sorts of information about blogs including number of comments on the blog that day, number of links to blog, number of visitors and some other basic stats. It is actually similar to mybloglog stats. Measuremap, however, has a nicer visual interface.
This means that the new Google Analytics software is much more blogger-friendly. The measuremaps tool was specifically designed for bloggers.
Now, you can sign up to Google Analytics, install the javascript code on your site and begin tracking data. This is an important first step for any blogger. When you know your audience, you know what to talk about.
Originally posted on June 16, 2007 @ 6:44 am
