Blogger's Secret

My favorite Google Analytics reports

Once you've accumulated some posts, you'll be wondering who is reading them and how they found them. Here are some of my favorite ways of using Google Analytics to slice up details.

1. Home > Real time > Overview. Get a picture of what's going on right now using Google's relatively new "real time" reporting. This snapshot is from Arborwiki, showing 11 active visitors, 3 of which are looking at the popular "Birthday Deals" page.

2. Content > Site Content > All Pages. This example, again from Arborwiki, shows the top viewed pages over a user specified interval. If you've been at your blogging for a while, you may be surprised which old posts turn up on the top of the list.

3. Traffic sources > Search Engine Optimization > Queries. This report shows which search terms are being used to reach your site, and how frequently someone clicks through for the terms presented. It requires that Webmaster Tools be configured. Data from the Vacuum weblog; note the dramatic difference in click through rates, ranging from 0.04% to 9.00%, for the top query terms.

4. Content > Site Search > Search Terms. If you've properly configured your blog's on-site search engine to report details, you'll get a list of terms that people are looking for more information about. Again this data is from Arborwiki. I've used the "compare to site average" bar to look at search exits, and one page pops out from this: "Apartments" behaves much worse than the rest of the site. That's worth exploring.

Google Analytics has a near-infinite number of reports that could be constructed, and when combined with the filters in the system you can zero in on a lot of detail. That's unlikely to be as useful at the start at getting some overview of what's going on overall on your site.

Look for simple measures of success at the beginning stages of a project

One of the secrets of writing a weblog that quietly shows your expertise is coming up with measures of success that match the stage that your project is in. A project in its early stages demands some feedback to show that you're heading in the right direction, but you're too early to deploy sophisticated analytical tools to optimize your efforts.

When you're at the very start, look for any sign that the project is working for you and your first readers. Any sort of traction is worthwhile. Be happy just to start. A good short term goal is simply to get some people who are friendly to look at what you are doing and to give you some helpful feedback. When the first stranger sees what you are doing and comments favorably, you have reached one milestone.

Some people get stuck before their first post in sorting out the design. I'll assume for now your good sense to use a blogging tool that has some default designs that are pleasant enough to the eye to be OK for a start, and where editing the first post doesn't require enormous amounts of decision making.

It is worthwhile to install page tracking tools like Google Analytics to track progress over time, for a longer and much more satisfying view of progress measured in months or years. There will be plenty of future opportunities to measure even more fine grained performance indicators, but you don't need to obsess about real time traffic when no one is reading, not yet at least.

What you really seek in the long run is the ability for people to think of you when a topic comes up, that "top of mind" sense for expertise that generates leads and referrals and introductions to other experts. It helps tremendously to have a blog post ready to back up whatever information you are ready to share with someone. Until you've built up a body of work, you might not have that level of detail handy - make sure that whatever schedule you have has enough flexibility to work up a publishable answer when the right question comes up out of the blue.

Success - at the start - could be measured in one person looking at one post. The right person, the right posting makes all the difference. Celebrate small wins.

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The "small wins" idea comes from Karl Weick. A small win is a "limited doable project that results in something concrete and visible." 

Install Google Analytics now; it's not hard, and it's helpful for later work.

Most of the truly ugly and hard to use blogging tools have quietly been replaced by other systems that are easy - perhaps too easy - to use. Wordpress, Blogger, and Tumblr are all reasonable free blogging tools; I use Typepad, which costs a modest amount each month.

It doesn't matter how many people read this.

I'm not writing this in order to have a million people read it. (That's good, because I'm sure that a million people won't read it.) I'm writing it because it needs to be written down, and published in such a way that I can find it again when I need it.

If your weblog has an internal audience as well as an external audience, you don't have to worry about every single thing that gets published being a massive blockbuster hit. Better to slowly and surely churn your way through building up a body of work, knowing that the time spent cultivating small numbers of important readers is just as important as fleeting fame.

500 words a day by 10:30 a.m. is part of this blogger's secret

My secret blogging routine is to get up, get the kids to school, get a cup of coffee and start typing. 500 words later, I have something that can go to an editor, with a 10:30 a.m. deadline. It's generally published by 11:30 a.m. That, plus email, takes care of the morning. Things that take time to write or a lot of telephone calls or research or records searches or anything clever get done in the afternoon.

Identifying a workable routine and then sticking to it is part of the secret. If you get one thing written about a subject every morning, then you have the whole rest of the day to write something else on topic. All else is commentary.

I measure my success by my word count (at least 500 words, but not too many) and by my ability to meet a deadline. The ideal story is posted precisely at 10:30 a.m., is completely edited with no need to change or omit words, and has a nice photo or video and a solid first paragraph when it's excerpted to Facebook and a solid title when it goes to Twitter. But mostly, it's done and out of the way.

Be careful what you measure

The conventional wisdom about blogs is that it's all about popularity - more page views, more hits, more subscribers, more more more.   With that comes a manifest obligation to measure all of the inputs and outputs of the system and to construct pages that attract the maximum number of viewers.  The entire population of inexpert "pro bloggers", with their teaser headlines and pointless numbered lists pulled straight from Cosmopolitan, live in this world of ever-declining ad revenues measured in pennies per thousand pages.

If you are an expert, however, you are not after explanations that cater to the masses, and you are not after a style or a structure that generates the maximum number of eyeballs looking at your stuff.  Most of those eyeballs are irrelevant.   Your readers have names, not numbers; you know them; they know you; and you rely on them not as abstract millions of minions but as individuals with whom you are telling and discovering a story.  The Blogger's Secret strategy values one good conversation more than a thousand anonymous page views.

Advertisers on the net who don't live in the pennies-per-thousand world live in the "cost per conversion" world, where success is measured by the number of very qualified people who pass through a very narrow funnel into the next stage of a process.  If you are a real estate blogger, you value the person who has given you a name and phone number and email address and permission to contact you, and a thousand random visitors are not as good as one real person.  If you are an expert in landslides, then a  moment by moment translation of an accounts of an imminent mudslide chronicled on Chinese television is far and above more relevant to your work than a thousand miscellaneous hits from Stumbleupon.

If you build systems to regularly measure things, be aware that you will try to improve them.  Be careful what you measure.  It may be better to not measure anything until you are certain what your goals are, and only then start to keep track of some aspect of them.  There is a quality without a number which resists homogenization and standardization and should be kept in mind if not in a spreadsheet.

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Some questions posed by this to answer in the future.

How do you measure and collect people who know and support what you are doing?

What ways can you identify specific people who will add their expertise to your efforts?

How do you use expert finding systems such as LinkedIn to improve your work?

When you do turn on analytics tools, what should you track and measure, and how do you do it?

Something about "pointless numbered bullshit" (credit Brian Kerr for that phrase) and the "quality without a number" (also Brian Kerr, via Chris Alexander)