Recording data associated with your blog or website

It is important to track the progress (or not) of any blogs/websites you are running. To do this, create a simple spreadsheet and update it regularly with the data you are most concerned about. It could be something simple like the number of people subscribed to your RSS feed or the amount of followers you have on Twitter.

For tracking more complicated data use the downloadable spreadsheets from Google Analytics and extract from those the data you want to watch – unique visitors, page impressions, bounce rate, average time spent of the site – these are good indicators of progress.

Statistics overload

Avoid becoming to focused on statistics. It is easy to crunch numbers all day, not so easy to create new and engaging content. Focusing on the latter is going to help you more in the early days of your blog.

Typically, blogs take a long time (six months, realistically, 12 months or more at least) to become established. It is easy to get disheartened in the early days and throw it all in just before all of your hard work starts to pay off. The amount of people who have tried and failed are testimony to that. And those that get past the six month hurdle are testimony to that fact that time is sometimes just as important as your writing (which should have improved greatly since your very first post).

What information should you watch?

Perhaps the most important factor is traffic. Without traffic your content will not be read and you will not make any money. Without traffic a blog is nothing.

I have never come across a web host that does not include a stats package as part of the deal, but you may wish to add Google Analytics and Clicky to your blog too (read Real time data tracking service by Clicky) for more in-depth analysis. This will enable you to see how many people are visiting your site, where they are coming from and their behaviour once they arrive.

Google Analytics and Clicky are very simple to implement; just add a bit of code to blog (usually in the footer, just before the closing BODY tag). If you are using WordPress there are several plugins you can use.

Google Webmaster Tools offers a lot of information about your website and can help diagnose any problems that may be occurring. Using the tools available here I discovered that one of my websites had been cloned, twice. I emailed the owners of the cloned versions and one of them removed it straight away, but the other ignored my emails and the site is still up!

With GWT you can track the following information:

Pages which are not being found
Pages restricted by your robots.txt file
Duplicate meta description tags
Long and short meta description tags
Missing title tags
Duplicate and non informative title tags
Long and short title tags
Top search queries
The amount of pages indexed by Google
Links to your site
Related sites in Google’s index
Feed subscribers

Adding the information from the reports to your spreadsheet will enable you to see how your website has progressed and it will enable you to fix any problems that may be stopping the site from progressing.

It is also a good idea to track the PageRank associated with each page, or at least your main pages if your website is quite large, as this will also indicate how much progress is being made.

Two other rankings which I suggest you record are created by Alexa and Technorati. As I said at the start of the post, don’t get too caught up watching and monitoring this kind of information, but over a period of six months or so it is good to see improvements on these figures and it will give you an indication as to how your website is perceived.

You can record and monitor any type of indicator you wish – you may like to record the amount of people following you on Twitter, Facebook or StumbleUpon. The amount of feedback you receive through comments or emails may be an important factor to you and the amount of people signing up for your newsletter may also be worth tracking.

The most important factor is to actually record this information on a weekly or monthly basis and use it to see how things are going. It can give you the boost you need to carry on or it can help you make the decision to give it up and move on to something else.