Blog Analysis: The Most Important Key Figures For Your Blog

Blog analysis: The most important key figures for your blog

If a blog is not just a hobby project, but is used by a large company as a marketing tool, for example, the key figures play a central role in addition to high-quality content. They are also interesting for private bloggers if they want to earn money with their blog through collaborations or advertising banners after they have created their blog. Thanks to various analysis tools, you can track exactly how effective the entire blog or an individual post is. This way you can check the effectiveness of your blog and then optimize it - for readers and search engines.

Analysis tools for bloggers

In order to get the relevant key figures, you first need the right analysis tool. Google Analytics is probably the most used solution for website analysis. It is suitable for both smaller blogs and larger company sites. There are numerous functions in favor of the tool, such as recording the number of visitors and average length of stay as well as providing user information such as origin, software used and much more. To do this, you generate a tracking code that you embed on your website. A Google account is required for the free service.

Of course there are also alternatives to Google Analytics. So is e.g. For example, the open source solution Matomo (Piwik) is the second most frequently used analysis tool. You can save all data obtained from Piwik on your own server. In particular, users who have data protection concerns with Google applications are well advised to use the tool. However, Piwik offers a smaller range of functions, which is only compensated for by additional plug-ins.

Mint offers a simpler alternative to analytics. For a one-time fee of $30, the user receives a simple, manageable user interface with all important basic data.

Traffic metrics: This is what's going on on your blog

After registering with an analysis tool, as a beginner you will initially be faced with a variety of different numbers, diagrams and values ​​- getting an initial overview is not easy. Where do you start with blog analysis? Which numbers are relevant for a blog? And how do you interpret the values? Of particular interest at the beginning are measurable values ​​for a website's traffic.

Page views/page impressions

When it comes to page impressions, each page viewed is counted. A high number can indicate an attractive blog that gets a lot of impressions thanks to well-placed links and references. But it can also mean that the user has difficulty finding his way around and randomly clicks through pages without finding what he is looking for. When analyzing the website, page views must therefore be considered in combination with other values, such as length of stay, in order to interpret them correctly. If you want to place online advertising on your blog, page impressions become an important factor - the so-called CPM (cost per thousand contacts) is often billed here.

Visits and meetings

Visits provide a summary of every page a visitor has viewed (during a session). Another session is recorded if the user returns the following day. These figures can be used to determine how frequently a user visits the blog and to identify returning visitors; if a reader consistently returns, that is undoubtedly a good sign.

Users (Special Guests)

One crucial factor in blog analysis is the quantity of unique visitors. Because this figure shows how many people your blog actually reaches. Google uses cookies, which allow a user to be uniquely identified, to ascertain this. But statistical errors still exist, for example.This can, for example, occur because two users use the same computer and are therefore only counted as one unique visitor. In addition, some visitors use anonymization tools that assign them a new IP address every time they visit a page.