Web Traffic Monitoring Tools for your Blog

My last post highlighted the practice of listing your blog on the various blog ranking sites out there. To date, even though my main site, www.Everdayfinance.blogspot.com (EDF from this point on) has ranked pretty high on some of them, they're not sending a ton of traffic to my site. How do I know this? For one, many of the sites list a summary showing your web traffic (listed as "total out"), which primarily determines your ranking (some of them throw in an added twist with unique votes you've obtained which count as say, 10 visits each). But there are some great free tools out there which analyze and detail everything from how many pages your average visitor views to duration of visit and where your visitors are from (I have no incentives or affiliate ads related to these tools, I just think they're great free options for small-medium blogs/websites). As to why I'm not getting much traffic from these ranking sites, I'm still investigating which other ones are out there that I haven't yet subscribed to and whether the pay sites are any better than the free ones. To date, I haven't shelled out any money to have my blog listed, but if there were an order of magnitude difference in potential there, I'd consider. One thing to keep in mind when starting your blog is that there's a whole universe of payed services you could employ, but tread carefully, or you'll never get into the black. I didn't want to start off in the red, so I've been starting off small and cheap and building from there. To date, I don't pay for anything. In the future, perhaps I want that Site Build It experience (see prior post or check out link on this page) or that customized sitemeter reporting capability, but I'm starting small since this is kind of an experiment in the making.

Sitemeter:
If you notice, on the bottom of the Everydayfinance site, there's a sitemeter button. If I click on this, I can log in and view all my statistics. Other visitors can click on it and sign up for just visit their site directly (www.sitemeter.com). It's a great tool to track and monitor your traffic and it's free! The free version is somewhat toned down, as they offer a pay service which is more powerful and customizable, but for my purposes, the free one it just fine. The


Here's a screen shot of a typical report:

This shot shows you everything you need to know about recent traffic, duration, page visits, etc.

I'll just add one more, which shows where the traffic is coming into your site. This one is logical, since my more recent post was on international real estate investment trusts which trounce the returns of the major market indices. It's intuitive to assume that most of your traffic will come through you most recent posts (more later on how to promote those posts and get regular subscribers/readers of your content), but occasionally, I'll notice an anomaly where previous posts are garnering a surprising amount of traffic compared to recent posts. This is attributed to a few different things. First, it could be that an older post was particularly interesting to people and a few email lists went around discussing the post. That contributes to a bit of a lag (or prolonged performance) in traffic for an older post. Another thing I do occasionally is reference an older post (when appropriate, not ad nausea) in a current post. After reading the current post, some readers will go back and check out an older, related post.

Upside:

• Very user friendly
• Easy to read summary screen
• Detailed info on who's visiting your site, how long, etc.
• Can have site traffic reports emailed automatically daily
• Can share all your statistics with site visitors if desired.
• A site traffic predictor which will telegraph your traffic for the next week, month, etc. based on recent traffic patterns.

Downside:

• The free version is a bit stripped down, limited reports/analysis
• No ability to trend back in time (only recent data available)
• Not customizable
  
  Google Analytics:
  
  This site is a little more complex, but also free. In my view, there are way more subcategories than are necessary; for me, some of them don't even return any relevant information. But I would say it's as good or better than sitemeter in several respects. Primarily, you can trend back to any timeframe desired with a handy calendar function. This is good when you notice an interesting trend and want to go back to a previous week and look for similar trends. There's a nice analysis on which of your pages people are most likely to exit from and similarly, which sites the traffic is coming from.
  
  Here's a screen shot of the traffic patterns:
  
  
  

The upsides/downsides pretty much contrast the sitemeter bullet points above.

Bottom line, I'd just sign up for both since they're free. Some days I like the quick summary page, so I log into sitemeter. Other days, I want a nice graphical trend of my traffic and a review of longer-term traffic patterns; hence analytics. Try them both out and report back in comments section on any neat tips/tricks findings.