Over the next couple of weeks, I’ll be covering a bit about statistics… the results of measuring traffic to a blog or website. Before we get into specifics of what the numbers mean (or even what software should be used to measure them), let’s start at the beginning and define a goal.
Generally having more visitors to one’s blog or website is good, but beyond that it’s hard to dive into statistics without knowing the purpose of the site. Are you using your website primarily to gain new clients? If so, you’ll want to make sure that folks can view your work, find your contact information, and take the next step to obtaining your services.
Are you using your site primarily as a showcase of your work? In that case, driving folks to the contact page might not be as important, but rather you’ll be concerned with whether or not visitors are reaching all areas of your site and spending a decent length of time before browsing away.
Are you using your site to post articles that will provide information for folks about a particular subject? You’ll probably end up being concerned about how well your site is doing with long term search engine traffic for those topics.
Think a bit about the main purpose of your site… what’s your goal?. Later this week we’ll continue our look at stats and analytics by comparing a few popular software packages.
Photo by DRB62, used under Creative Commons licensing
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