How to improve your blog using stats

Happy Thursday guys!  Time for another Blogger Series post.  Today’s topic is about using your stats to help make improvements to your blog.

Why you should pay attention to blog stats

Stats about your blog play an important role in helping you figure out what works and what doesn’t.

WordPress.com includes a stats section under the dashboard.  This covers details about your blog’s traffic, broken down by views, likes and comments.  These can be reviewed by days, weeks, months and years.

It gives insights into Posting Activity, below shows a chart revealing how frequently I have posted per month.

Checking you are on the right path

The stats can help to track your progress.  The chart below shows the all-time views for my blog.  You can easily see when I started to take this blog more seriously and how the views increased following a rebranding and a more consistent posting schedule.

These insights let me know what I was doing was working.  I was able to analyse month by month and make changes based on this data.

I looked back on each month to see what I had done and why some months for worse than others.

By monitoring the amendments I had been making I was able to see the increase in views, follows and comments.

Below is the year chart that shows the increase I made following changes made in 2016.  I made further alterations to the blog in 2017 which showed a small increase.

Finally, I pushed my blog further in 2018, which can be seen in the sharp increase since we are only 7 months into 2018 and I have already almost exceeded 2017’s stats.

Focus your attention where it’s needed

By using the stats, you can steer changes to your blog that can be most beneficial.  Within the stats are information like “Referrers,” these are links that have referred people to your blog.  From this data, you can decide if you need to change tactic.

Below shows some of my referrers.  I had considered closing my Facebook Author Page for a while, however, it is listed as one of my top referrers.

So I decided to keep it and focus more effort into increasing posts on there.  After I made changes to how I used Pinterest, this started to move up my referrers list too.

I also added my blog to a directory, Blogarama which has brought decent traffic to my site.  This has made me aware that directories can be beneficial so I’ve been searching out additional ones.

Knowing where your traffic comes from can help you to know where you need to put more attention or where you need to withdraw your focus and move it to something else.

Take the time to get to know your stats and monitor them whenever you make any changes.

For more detailed insights you can use programs such as Google Analytics, but when you’re starting out, the stats you have with your blogging platform are usually sufficient to get you on the right path.

Do you monitor your stats and use them to make changes to your blog?

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I hope you are all enjoying the Blogger Series.  All the previous posts in this series are listed in my Tutorials in the Blogger section.

I am still currently updating my Tutorial Sections, but hopefully, these will all be up to date soon 🙂

I’ll be back tomorrow.  Feel free to leave me your thoughts in the comments below and if you want to see something specific on this blog, drop me a message using the contact form.

Happy writing

Ari

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