Welcome to the first day of the 31 Days to a Brand New Blog Challenge! Your task is to complete each of the daily exercises and either blog or comment about the results (if some of the exercises don’t really apply to you, no worries).
But wait. How will you know whether any of these activities had an impact on your blog when we get to the end of the month?
Today’s assignment
The assignment today is to look at your baseline info for the last month so you can compare and see what changes when you get to the end of August. To do this, you have to be able to analyze your blog’s traffic. And the best tool for that is Google Analytics. If you don’t have Google Analytics yet, use today to take the time to install it!
Here’s where you can sign up for Google Analytics: http://www.google.com/analytics/sign_up.html. Once you sign up, you will given a piece of HTML code to place on your blog so you can start collecting data. Note: You will need a Gmail account to be able to use Google Analytics.
If you already have Google Analytics, here are the metrics you should take a look at (use July 1-31 as the time period):
- Number of visits
- Number of pageviews
- Bounce rate (shows the percentage of people who leave your site almost immediately)
- Average time on site
- Traffic sources (shows which sites are sending you the most traffic)
- Keywords (found in the traffic sources section – shows which terms are people using to get to your blog)
- Most popular posts (found in the content overview section)
Your assignment is to take a look at each of these seven metrics and blog about your results or post a comment about what you learned from looking at them. If you blog about today’s challenge, please post the link in the comments section!
What if I just started my blog?
There are many of you in the challenge who just started a new blog. Since you don’t have any data yet, use today to make sure that you have Google Analytics installed on your blog.
What if I haven’t blogged in a while?
Some of you are doing this challenge to get back into the blogging groove. If you haven’t blogged in a while, I would just look at the data from the last month that you did blog. Again, if you don’t even have Google Analytics, use today to make sure that you have Google Analytics installed on your blog.
Note: Please tag your posts with “31bnb” to make them easier to share with us.
Hi everyone!
This 31 days program is a great idea! I just started bloging so its will follow it to see how I improve.
So I registered on Google Analytics last night, then I invited all the people I knew to visit the facebook page for my blog and to go check it out directly.
1. Number of visits: 29
2. Number of pageviews: 110
3. Bounce rate: 45%
4. Average time on site: 3min
5. Traffic sources: 90% referring, haha which all came from facebook! 10% direct
6. Keywords: none for now
7. Most popular posts: about page, fashion category, posts about Korean Beauty and Shopping in Manila.
Will keep up with the rest of the steps!
Thanks for this great resource!
Wow! This has been an eye-opener for me. Thanks. so much. On to Day 2.
Thanks Rosetta! I was like this could get taxing!
Hello, I'm late getting started but I wanted to add my 2cents nonetheless. Short background info….I started my blog on blogger and I'm not capturing all visitors that still go there despite an informal “we've moved” reroute over to the new spot on wordpress. Bloggers, any suggestions on how to handle that.
I too, am VERY happy to be in this community of folks trying to make their blogs better. Here are the stats that I can offer from my wordpress experience. FYI, I own hellinahandbag.me and originalnajeema.com | I would like to upload the blog to hellinahandbag.me very soon. Any help would be appreciated. I'm such a scaredeecat when it comes to that.
1. Number of visits 3,262
Busiest day: 128 — Wednesday, July 7, 2010
2. Number of pageviews
3. Bounce rate ?
4. Average time on site ?
5. Traffic sources – very random
6. Keywords
sade
pictures of christina milian baby
stacie turner housewives of dc
stacy turner housewife harvard probation
jason turner real housewives
7. Most popular posts
My home page and most recent post “Marriage is Making a Comeback” is leading the page views this week, as well as my About page, because people are more than likely confused about what this blog is about. I think the purpose assignment will help me better spruce up that page.
Like other participants, I'm on wordpress. I set up google analytics months ago, but had not visited the site since I first registered. When I initially saw the assignment, I went back to Google Analytics for the first time to see the latest stats. The results? 3 visits. THREE VISITS??? I knew something had to be wrong. Viewing everyones comments shed some light on my issue: I need my own domain.
For the month of July based on WP, I generated the following stats:
Number of visits: ?
Number of Page views: 178
Bounce Rate: ?
Average time on site: ?
Traffic Sources: Twitter, Facebook
Keywords: Matthew Hickey (one of the featured people on the blog)
Most popular posts: Work In Progress-6 months later, CEL: Hip Hop Soul Recording Artist
Not sure if other stat trackers might also be a solution. I do have a blogger blog and like that they now use a shadow of Google Analytics for Blogger Stats (not all the same stats, but the general basics like the ones you listed). I also use statcounter.com It is free, it is easy, great log downloads and options for blocking cookies (so you don't boost your own stats and the like) and labeling so that you can keep track of your stalkers. It's really reverse stalking. Which I might be a little too consumed with (smile). Give it a try to see if WP blogs can use it too.
God, no! It should be enough to post the code as a text widget on your homepage.
WordPress here as well! I'm thinking my own host domain is the way to go, as I really like what Google Analytics produces.
1.Number of visits: Unless I'm missing something (totally possible!) WP does not count visits, just pageviews.
2.Number of pageviews: 895
3.Bounce rate: not available
4.Average time on site: not available
5.Traffic sources: twitter.com, twitter.com/adriannerussell, healthfitnesstherapy.com (that's interesting!)
6.Keywords: not available. WP will show keywords used to find specific postst but not the blog itself.
7.Most popular posts: museums & memory, funky love, museum snobbery on the ropes.
When using Google Analytics for your blog is it necessary to copy the code into every new blog post?
Yeah, the problem is that you cannot use Google Analytics with wordpress.com blogs, only self-hosted blogs on your own domain. I actually didn't know that until everyone started posting their blog stats. One more reason why everyone should have a self-hosted blog!
just getting started so I only have a few posts and I am on wordpress, through my own url, using WP stats for now. I have to figure out if Google Analytics is applicable.
1. Number of visits – 145
2. Number of pageviews – ?
3. Bounce rate (shows the percentage of people who leave your site almost immediately) – not available
4. Average time on site – not available
5. Traffic sources (shows which sites are sending you the most traffic)
facebook.
blackarch.uc.edu
6. Keywords (found in the traffic sources section – shows which terms are people using to get to your blog)
- not available
7. Most popular posts (found in the content overview section)
AA architects by the numbers
I have my own domain but it is tied to wordpress. I am just attempting the assignment. Is there a problem using Google anylytics with WP? do I need to login in to my url hosting? Please help the newbie. Thanks.
I've been blogging a little over a month and I have 0.0 data. http://www.shannmmarsh.blogspot.com
My blog's traffic for July:
0. Uniques: 4,578
1. Number of visits: 24,920
2. Number of pageviews: 56,841
3. Bounce rate: ?
4. Average time on site: ?
5. Traffic sources: direct link, linkedin, twitter
6. Keywords:
wild woman fundraising
naked african
wild fundraising
wildwomanfundraising
naked african women
wild women fundraising
http://wildwomanfundraising.com
naked african woman
fundraiser planning checklist
7. Most popular posts for July:
http://www.wildwomanfundraising.com/myth-naked-…
http://www.wildwomanfundraising.com/free-stuff/
http://www.wildwomanfundraising.com/fired-awesome/
Here you go!
Mazarine
okay, i'm also in wordpress.com limbo right now; although i have been “working on” a wordpress.org blog for about a year now…
Number of visits: ?
Number of pageviews: 243
Bounce rate (shows the percentage of people who leave your site almost immediately): ?
Average time on site: ?
Traffic sources (shows which sites are sending you the most traffic):
my twitter profile
my own tweets
facebook (LOTS of hits here)
google (yay! …except it also says no search engines have sent you any traffic yet.)
hootsuite
lmodules.com <~ i gotta figure out what that is
deepwellbridge's wp.com blog
mycrazyreader.info
this site/process
problemwithdrug.us.pn
hollabackdc's wp.com blog
technologyweneed.net.ms
examiner.com
alcoholloveyourtreatment.net.tc <~ O_o
basseyworld's wp.com blog
liriklagu.wanarif.com
[okay, i am VERY confused by this mix... and i just realized this is not july specific, i don't think.]
Keywords (found in the traffic sources section – shows which terms are people using to get to your blog): none?
Most popular posts (found in the content overview section): my landing page (133 views); the page where i go off about my personal randomness (23 views); my rant about being fat (16 views). interesting that, aside from my pages about myself, the most popular posts of all time are about an urban teacher opp, my plan to roam the world, & my rant about why yele haiti is ok by me.
I have a WordPress blog– here's what I found on the blog stats page:
Total views: 4,725
Busiest day: 488 – Wednesday, June 23 (this was the day I got an essay on another site)
Usually the referrers I see are Facebook, Twitter and Networked Blogs.
I am using WordPress so Google Analytics is not working.
I have had 140 visitors with my busiest day being July 20 with 20 views.
A follow-up… Since July 9th, I've been tweeting links via bit.ly. This represents both blog posts and other links of interest. Looking at the stats, 150 people clicked on my links. Over half have been via Face Book (my tweets post there as well, plus I have a much larger network on FB) and a third have been via e-mail clients. Unfortunately, it's not clear whether the e-mail client clicks are a result of a subscription to my blog, or Twitter/FB updates via e-mail, or what. 2 clicks are a result of comments I've posted on other blogs… not a lot, but confirmation that I can create traffic that way!
It is a bit interesting. Only 3% traffic comes from Twitter even though I have two Twitter accounts with the blog address listed. This stat may indicate two factors I suspect are at play: (1) my target audience is most active on Facebook, if any, social media, and (2) my tweets almost never link to my blog/site. i almost always tweet or RT news or info located on another site.
I just installed Google Analytics on Friday so I am not sure whether the stats are yet worth reporting. I can however say that I would like to reduce my bounce rate and increase the amount of time people spend on my blogs.
My “karibumicrofinance” blog is doing better than my “musings of a new econ grad” blog although the stats for the latter may be incorrect as I did not add the correct Google Analytics ID to that blog until a day after.
As I am using tumblr, I wondered whether it matters that people can read most entries without actually going to another page and whether or not that is a bad thing in terms of the stats?
Also, I tried Google Analytics help to try and resolve how to track RSS subscriptions but no luck. Has anyone got any suggestions?
Looking very much forward to the next challenge!
Wow, this sounds like just what I need – Im so in!
L
I know you're pretty active on Twitter – would be interesting to see if it's one of your biggest referring sites.
I have wordpress as well ard here's what is available. I'm going to research having my own domain.
Blog Stats Summary Tables
Total views: 105
Busiest day: 9 — Friday, January 29, 2010
Views today: 1
Totals
Posts: 3
Comments: 4
Categories: 4
Tags: 2
Email Subscribers
Blog:1 active
Comments: 0 subscribers, 0 subscriptions
Hi all! I am very excited to kick this off! I just recently started blogging and signed up for google analytics a few days before the challenge, so only have a few days of data to look at. But nonetheless, it was great to go in and check out all of these categories to know what to look out for moving forward. Again, thanks for doing this Rosetta!
I thought this would be a good opportunity to compare some of my July Google Analytics stats to April's to see what improved and what didn't since launch:
1. Number of visits: 188 (Jul) // 338 (Apr)
2. Number of pageviews: 615 (Jul) // 803 (Apr)
3. Bounce rate: 58% (Jul) // 55.33% (Apr)
4. Average time on site 5:15 (Jul) // 3:11 (Apr)
5. Traffic sources: Direct 36%, Referring 61%, 2% Search Engines (Jul) // Direct 53%, Referring 28%, Search Engines 17% (Apr)
6. Keywords: fusedc, peer networking audit checklist, social justice dc local (Jul) // fusedc, direct service referral network dc (Apr)
7. Most popular posts: home, resource-hub/links, blog (Jul) // home, opportunity calendar (Apr)
Awesome! Just be aware that Google will take a day or two to crawl your blog and pull up stats for you. So you don't think it's broken or user error LOL
Interesting that your most popular posts were about celebrities…
Oh I didn't know you still had a WordPress.com blog, thought you had your own host. The great thing about your situation is that you have good traffic to build off of once you do start blogging regularly again.
Just signed up! I like the interface… curious to see how my stats change over the next 31 days!
I've had my blog since Sunday, July 25, 2010. Here are my WordPress stats for the past week:
Total views: 325
Busiest day: 106 — Monday, July 26, 2010
Views today: 1
Totals
Posts: 7
Comments: 2
Categories: 1
Tags: 24
Email Subscribers
Blog:0 active
Comments: 1 subscriber, 1 subscription
Spam
Akismet has protected your site from 1 spam comments.
i thought i'd post my blog about the topic as well….i focused on the keywords that people use to get to my blog bit.ly/calRu1
Hi all. Sick and high on cold meds so I'm not responsible for any typos! I didn't want to be behind on the challenge before I got started!
I haven't blogged regularly since about May '09. I've had about 6 posts since then. What's surprising to me is that I still get anywhere from about 4700-9000 page views a month. Of course this is nowhere near my average of 6-15K. But I am still surprised that a blog with extremely sporadic content gets any views at all. I guess I can attribute that to deep archives and good SEO.
As with others on WordPress.com blogs, I'm unable to install Google Analytics, which is why we need our own domains.
To answer the queries, I looked at stats for all time with the exception of pageviews. I looked at May 2009 (my last month of active blogging) for that stat:
1. Number of visits – Can't measure
2. Number of pageviews – 9,452 (May 2009)
3. Bounce rate (shows the percentage of people who leave your site almost immediately) – can't measure
4. Average time on site – can't measure
5. Traffic sources: soulbounce.com (from folks directly visiting their site – maybe clicking on my site linked from my comments – and from clicks on their blogroll) twitter.com, wordpress tag related to maxwell's last album (good seo!)
6. Keywords: inspirational songs 2009, african people (shrug), songs in the key of life, hottentot venus
7. Most popular posts: Top 5 Inspirational Songs of 2009, List of my top 50 favorite songs of all time, Brick House (post about Serena Williams as modern day venus hottentot), list of my top female soul singers (people like listicles)
I have wordpress too so I use the stats there:
Number of visits: Not available
Number of views:1,825
Bounce Rate: Not available
Avg. time on site: Not available
Traffic sources: bloggingwhilebrown.com, twitter.com, diaryofahappyblackwoman.com (yay)
Keywords: now the keywords were wild to me :
“for colored girls who have considered suicide” (name of a shange play)
“black girl”
“topless black girls” (?)
“black girl blog”
“are there any black people on mad men”
“desiree rogers”
“american apparel ad controversy”
Most Popular posts:
http://elledub08.wordpress.com (home page)
http://elledub08.wordpress.com/about/
http://elledub08.wordpress.com/2010/03/28/tyler…
http://elledub08.wordpress.com/2008/10/09/stab-…
I also had 17 subscribers.
First off I want to say how glad I am to be apart of this challenge and can’t wait to cross the finish line more knowledgeable about my brand and blogging. I started my blog in November 2008 but only recently sign up for Google Analytics. Here are my findings for July 1-31st.
1. Number of visits: 164/91 absolute unique visitors
2. Number of pageviews: 314 Pageviews/1.91 Average Pageviews
3. Bounce rate: 67.68%
4. Average time on site: 2:05
5. Traffic sources: I currently have search engines block (changing this now): Direct Traffic (53.66%); Referring Sites (44.51%); Search Engines 1.00 (0.61%).My top referral is Twitter with 20.73%.
6. Keywords: Only keyword that came up is my full name. Go figure it’s the name of my blog.
7. Most popular posts: Other than my home page (42.68%), my two most popular post are My freelance life: Freelancing choose me and Bizx: Business Card Exchange.
I already have wordpress stats installed; I use google analytics but not as much. Number of visits: 1205 visits in July. Most traffic seems to be coming through from Twitter, google search engine, and a few websites/blogs that have linked to me. Most traffic to my site is direct traffic. I'll have to look into other stats more carefully – such as bounce rate and pageviews! Thanks for these pointers – I'll see if I can utilize Google Analytics more.
Sure is – you're sure to see an improvement at the end of the month
Easy one for me today. I had search engine access disabled. Now changed that but starting with big fat zeros across the board! That's a fine benchmark for an experiment
I am using WordPress that is embedded into my website. I will ask my web designer if he can implement google analytics into the programming.
http://www.aliahpr.com/blog.html
Total views: 665
Busiest day: 115 — Thursday, May 27, 2010
1 active subscriber
Search engine terms: love public relations
I have a wordpress.com blog and it doesn't allow google analytics however they do provide some stats just not all that you requested. But, here goes
Number of visits: Not available
Number of views: 1,046
Bounce Rate: Not available
Avg. time on site: Not available
Traffic sources: nwso.net, twitter.com/Ronnie6676, facebook.com/thecandyshoppe
Keywords: “song sampled in Kandi by One eskimO”, “One eskimO and Kandi Stanton”, “Neon Trees”
Most popular posts (not including pages):
http://thecandyshoppe.wordpress.com/2010/07/11/…
http://thecandyshoppe.wordpress.com/2010/07/08/…
http://thecandyshoppe.wordpress.com/2010/07/19/…
I also had 6 subscribers and 33 comments.
I am super excited about all of these numbers as this is my first 30 days. I think I'm doing pretty good and hope that this challenge magnifies that success.
Number of visits: 739
Number of pageviews: 1,214
Bounce rate: 72.53%
Average time on site: 2min, 3sec
Traffic sources: Direct (41%), Google (20%), Facebook (8%), LinkedIn (7%), Twitter (4%)
Keywords: “new postal rates” “devin mathias” “more donors”
Most popular posts:
http://moredonors.blogspot.com (main page)
http://moredonors.blogspot.com/2010/07/eco-ride…
http://moredonors.blogspot.com/2010/07/follow-u…
I only just launched my blog on July 21st. So, between July 21st-July 31st, I've had:
1) 102 visitors (71 unique visitors)
2) 2.19 pages per visit (note that there are only 4 pages on the site so far as I've had only 2 blog posts!)
3) 50.98% bounce rate
4) 2:28 average time on site
5) About 49% of my traffic is from direct traffic and 48% is from referring websites. Breaking down the referring websites, 26% of my traffic is from twitter and 14% is from facebook. The remaining 8% of website referral is this website, a random indexing website that linked me (articles.icmcc.org) and a blogging community that I was a part of (A-list blogging bootcamp). The remaining 3% of non-direct/non-referral traffic is from google and feedburner (I have exactly 3 subscribers last I checked).
6) I've only had one referral so far from search engines, from someone that searched for “evernote in medicine” which.. isn't something my site is optimized for at all. In fact, when I search “evernote in medicine” I can't find my site at all within the first ten pages of search results!
7) Most people come in on my website http://www.medicineforchange.com/ so that's my “top page.” However, my most popular post (out of two) has been, rather unsurprisingly, the post about healthcare and social media (which you can find at: http://www.medicineforchange.com/healthcare-and…).
In general, I think I haven't been doing that badly, but I would really like to build up more content. I feel uncomfortable promoting my site more before I have more well-established and better content, if that makes sense..
Just added google analytics on http://interpretingslavelife.blogspot.com, and thanks to Bernadette, I am also using blogger in draft as well. I just need to wait for Google to pull up my stats to see where I stand.
If you are on Blogger, Blogger in Draft (which is AWESOME) lets you get stats right off your toolbar. Not as detailed as Google Analytics or StatCounter which is what I used before. But I do like that it is really convenient for the basics.
With http://www.b3homedesigns.blogspot.com, thanks for the reminder. Just installed there.
With http://www.coloredwhite.blogspot.com, even though I really didn't blog much last month, here were my stats for July 2010/February 2010 (February was my biggest traffic month on my blog although, ironically, I didn't blog a single entry Feb, March or April this year).
Also, are we talking # of visits or number of visitors. Not sure I know the difference between # of visits/pageviews so I went with # of visitors and # of pageviews
1. Number of (unique) visit[or]s: July (144)/Feb (735)
2. Number of pageviews: (178)/Feb (811)
3. Bounce rate: 83.3%
4. Average time on site: less than 5 seconds
5. Traffic sources: twitter, blogging for branding, various blogroll referrals (raving black lunatic primary send), my other blogs (primarily, b3designs), various blogs I read/comment at (centsational girl primary send)
6. Keywords: things I love/to love about life, my name, great room concept, husband's name, waiting for my celibate girlfriend, my coloured friends make fun of me because I'm white
7. Most popular posts: http://coloredwhite.blogspot.com/2008/02/101-th…, http://coloredwhite.blogspot.com/2010/05/i-miss…, http://coloredwhite.blogspot.com/2010/01/what-w…
Spent a good 20 looking at stats just now. That was really kind of fun.