Who’s Visiting My Blog?

If you’re a new blogger and you want to find out who’s visiting your blog or website, there are a few ways to do it. Actually, quite a few ways. One way is to start is with the statistics counter at StatCounter.com. StatCounter has a free service and a paid service. Here’s the break down.

To start, I recommend using the free service.

StatCounter works in a Project metaphor, which means for every blog or website you put StatCounter code on, that blog or website is considered a project. After you’ve run the StatCounter code on your blog or website, you login to your StatCounter page and you’ll see a list of your projects with a quick view of the count of visitors today, yesterday, this month and a running total. When you click on a project, you can drill down and view the type of stats listed below.

A Summary Page

StatCounter’s summary page shows a nice simple bar graph of your visitor count.

In this particular graph the huge spikes are what StumbleUpon can do for you. When someone submits one of your blog posts to StumbleUpon and the traffic follows, you get a huge quick spike of traffic. Which is good because when you’re first starting to blog it can be very motivating to see this effect. But, that’s for another day.

Popular Pages

Here’s a list of your popular pages.

For the rest of the StatCounter statistics I’ll just list some of the features and not provide screen shots.

Popular Pages

The popular pages stat list the count of visitors to particular pages on your blog. This can help since it might be telling you that a particular page is more popular to your readers than some of your other blog posts. With this information then, you could focus more blog posts on the more popular topics your readers like.

Recent Keyword Activity

This stat will show you the search terms people used to get to a particular page on your blog. This is helpful because you could write blog posts that contain more of those keywords that searchers used to make it to your blog.

Recent Came From

This tells you where your visitors are coming from. What sites are referencing your site or who’s linked to you. It also shows the landing page at your blog or website that a user showed up on.

If you’ve read about ways to increase your blog traffic, one way is to comment on other blogs that you read and like. When you comment, you usually have the opportunity to leave the link to your blog with that comment. The Recent Came From stat will show you those visitors to your blog that came from those comments. So, keep leaving great comments at all those other blogs you love. 😉

There’s plenty of other statistics you can browse through and drill down to discover where visitors are located around the world, how long they stayed, what browser they’re using, the size of their screen resolution and even the operating system they’re using. It’s fun to dig in and view all those stats.

Blog Statistics Addiction

Watch out though, a lot of bloggers including new bloggers who find out how to track statistics can get caught up in them. This can either be a driver or a downer. What we keep being told by the pro bloggers is to stick with it and that the first three to six months or even year are the toughest and for some every month and year can be tough.

How To

You might be asking, “How do I get StatCounter to work on my blog or website?” Well let’s walk through the registration and setup. Here is a video of how to get started with StatCounter. I use a test Blogger blog to show you how. It is just as easy for a website or any other type of blog like WordPress. If you need help, please ask in the comments.