Why you should check your site analytics daily
Site analytics are not just for Web developers, advertising execs or managers.
No, they are especially important for content producers. I’ve heard many people say that they never check site analytics of that they only check them on a monthly basis.
You should check daily. The purists will tell you that monitoring site analytics will cause you to produce shallow content that is link bait. That somehow all you’ll start creating is Britney Spears stories.
Those people don’t get it. Don’t listen to them. I monitor BeatBlogging.Org’s analytics all the time, and I’ve never written about Spears or any other celebrity. Monitoring the stats allows me to understand which content resonates with users and why.
BeatBlogging.Org focuses heavily on social networking technologies. I could guess which sites people are more interested in or what facets of each technology people want to learn more about. Or I could just check my site analytics.
Guess which social network usually shows up in the top search terms that reach BeatBlogging.Org? Not Twitter, Facebook, Friendfeed, Seesmic, MySpace, Brightkite, etc.
No. Ning. Time and time again people come to this site searching for information about Ning. We haven’t written a post on Ning in months. Still, people reguarly come to this site looking for information about Ning.
So, guess what? We’re going to start making more content about Ning. Now, I would have never guessed that people would be dying for information about Ning, but it’s true. It’s a network that many journalists and news organizations want to learn more about.
But, you’re probably wondering then, “Why should I check my site analytics daily? Surely, this trend is noticable on the macro level.” You’d be correct in one sense, but missing a larger point in another.
On a macro level, I can clearly see that people want more content on Ning. But I would have missed that yesterday a top search query to this site was “Ning complaints.”
Ning isn’t the easiest social network to use, and it can be overkill for many people. It’s got some quirks. People want to know about those, how to get around them and how to maximize the usefulness of Ning.
Another popular search query is, “Ning vs Drupal.” That query tells me that a lot of people don’t understand what Ning and Drupal are. They are not remotely competitors.
This is something that BeatBlogging.Org could help clear up. Ning is a site that allows people to make custom social networks, while Drupal is an open-source content management system.
The other huge advantage to frequently monitoring site analytics is that it can help shed light on why some stories where popular while others weren’t.
This might mean that you released content at the wrong time of day. Maybe your headline lacked SEO juice. Or perhaps you did a good job of marketing your latest content on social networks like Twitter, Facebook, Friendfeed, etc.
Or maybe the content you produced just wasn’t in high demand. Sometimes we produce content that we think people want, when in reality there is a very small marketplace for it. Site analytics will certainly shed light on that.
There are a lot of valuable lessons to be learned from site analytics. None of these valuable lessons will cause you to dumb down your content. Rather, they can help you realize which content areas you’re undeserving, and they can also help you realize how to get the most out of your content.
There are many others, more detailed areas of Web and site analytics that we could explore. But I would strongly encourage all content producers to at least monitor which posts are popular, which search queries are popular and where referring traffic is coming from.
