I took several stats courses through undergrad and when I obtained my first graduate degree. I remember that one of the professors who taught the course said that any good statistician could manipulate the data so that the statistics would fall in their favor. He also said some stats you hear are just plain old made-up.
For instance take a look at this article (Beware some content NSFW) Some stats are just…
But I digress…Stats can be your friend. If you want to increase traffic to your blog you first need to know how much traffic you are getting.
3 useful stats when managing a blog would be:
1. Direct Traffic: Users that are probably regulars
2. Search Engine Traffic: Those who got to your blog through a Google or similar search
3. Social Media Traffic: These people will be more likely to share your blog’s content
Being a newbie to blogging when my little number at the bottom of my personal blog page goes up (it tracks hits) I do get excited, so I think to a newbie like me that number tells me a lot. I found a neat blog post about a woman who was obsessing over blog stats!
Another thing, as a newbie, I see as a great indicator if your blog is being trafficked and by what sorts of people are the comments left by your readers. This can give you an anecdotal, if not scientific, look at your blog readership.
But if you want hard numbers, and not anecdotes; Linked here is a great article on what types of metrics are out there, specifically for WordPress, the blogging platform we use for IST 600 Metrics for WordPress
My 2 favorites from the list are:
- Track how is your content shared on Twitter, Facebook, Google +1, StumbleUpon, Digg and LinkedIn.
- Find out exactly how many times your posts/pages have been shared across these social networks.
- Performance of all blog posts and pages is displayed in tabular format.
- Browse to find out which posts have gone viral and been popularized over the social media.
- Use the information to find out which social media websites should you promote your content the most.
- Access Social Metrics from WordPress Admin bar.
- Easily filter the displayed output by categories and by month.
- Quickly switch between posts and pages.
- Choose how many posts you wish to see at a time.
- Seamlessly share posts/pages over the social networks from right within the Social Metrics Dashboard.
- Lightweight plugin with minimal settings.
- Sitemap Submission Option to Google, Bing, Yahoo and Ask.com.
- Manual HTML Header / Footer section.
- Google Updates the Asynchronous Tracking snippet to the latest version provided by Google.
- Warning/Success/Failure messages on sitemap submission.
In conclusion, I think several factors come into play on which stats would be most helpful to a blogger. Some of these factors are if you are new to blogging or a seasoned pro. If you are looking to profit off your blog or not. And how big of a community you want.
My adventures in Blogging: Professional Edition 