Booksellers Blog

image credit: vrypan via flickr

Analytics.

It sounds like a scary word to most of us in the book business. We tend to be more comfortable with words than large amounts of data. In reality, though, analytics give you great insight into who is visiting your blog, how they found you, and what they looked at once they arrived.  In fact, analytics can be so fascinating that you can spend hours slicing and dicing the data — if you want. It’s also easy to get a quick snapshot and spend very little time analyzing the data.

There are all types of analytics packages out there. One of the most powerful is also free: Google Analytics. It’s simple to set up — you just install a little bit of code on your blog — and it starts tracking. I also like Statcounter, though the free version is limiting in that it only gives you drilldown data for the last 500 visitors (total visitors, page views, etc. are aggregated). Both services give you similar information.

The screenshot illustrating this post is just a sample, but it gives you an idea of what your Google Analytics dashboard will look like.

Some things you’ll want to take a look at:

Where your visitors are located – This is based on the visitor’s IP address and  isn’t 100% accurate (for instance, anyone coming from an AOL account tends to register out of Virginia), but it’s a good guide. Obviously, as a local bookseller, you want to see many visitors from your city, state, or region. If you are attempting to build your e-commerce site, you may want to get visitors from further afield. Often you can track an IP address to a specific site. For instance, I can tell when someone from Random House visits this site. I can’t tell who at Random House is visiting, since the entire building has the same IP address, but I do know that someone at 1745 Broadway is reading.

How they got to your blog — also known as Traffic Sources. For instance, our data for Books on the Nightstand tells us that 31% came directly to the site — that is, they typed www.booksonthenightstand.com into their browser or have it in their bookmarks. 45% came from referring sites — other blogs or websites linked to us, and the visitor clicked one of those links to find us. 24% came from search engines, of which Google represented 90%. I can drill farther into those numbers, to see which keywords people searched on in Google, or what sites linked to us and brought the most traffic (Twitter, Facebook, Google Reader, then Goodreads).

Keywords they used to find you — if you have specific goals for your blog, you probably have key words for which you want to rank high in the search engines. For Books on the Nightstand, we want to known as a place for “book recommendations” — that’s the keyword that we try to use in our posts whenever we can naturally fit it in. So when I see people are coming to our site based on a Google search for “book recommendations blog”, I know that we are on the right track.  If your store is in Springfield, you certainly want to rank high for Google searches on “bookstore Springfield.”

How long they stayed – I don’t actually pay attention to this number for blogs, but it’s featured pretty prominently and can look worrisome if you don’t understand it. If you have a traditional website, this is a measurement you do want to look at — you want your visitors to stay on your site as long as possible. It shows that they are engaged with your site and that it provides them value.  On a blog, however, which aggregates multiple posts on one “page”, this is a misleading statistic. It is measured as the amount of time it takes for a visitor to click a link on your site — but since most people just read the blog posts that are there, and then go away, it’s not truly an accurate measurement of how much time they spent there. If it took them 10 minutes to read all of the posts and they never clicked a link, their time on site would show as 0.

There are a lot of other parameters that you can track — new vs. returning visitors, what computer systems and monitor resolutions your visitors are using, etc.

Besides these analytics, I use Feedburner to track the number of subscribers. These are people who sign up to be notified whenever we post new content to the site. Feedburner tracks how many people subscribe to your RSS feed through various feed readers (Google Reader is most popular) and through email. This is the number that I tend to pay the most attention to — I feel like these are our loyal readers, who engage with your content the most.  Like everything else, it’s not 100% accurate (it only counts those people that open their feedreader or download their email that day), but it’s good to look at the trends. Are your subscribers trending up over time? Then you’re doing something right.

You certainly don’t need to spend hours a day delving into your blog data, but even just a few minutes a few times a week can yield some valuable information, and can give you an idea of  who is reading your blog and how they are finding you.

Here are some additional links for more information:

How to Use Google Analytics for Beginners

Using Google Analytics to Check Your Blog Stats (YouTube video)

Tomorrow: Blogging FAQ, Day 6:  How do I write posts that people will want to read?

Previous posts in this series:

• Ten Days of Blogging FAQs
• Day 1: Who’s going to read our blog?
• Day 2: Where do I find the time to blog?
• Day 3: I already have a newsletter, do I really need a blog?
• Day 4: What do I blog about?