A Review of Web Metrics, Analytics + Optimization for Bloggers
Blogging is about more than just writing and posting your articles to your weblog. If you have any desire to actually earn a living from your online publishing pursuits - be it through contextual advertising, CPM (Cost per M, M=1000) advertising, or affiliate programs, you have to measure and improve your weblog/ website’s performance.
Web metrics refers to the measure of various performance values, be it the number of visitors per day, pageviews per week, revenue per month, ad clicks, comments, bandwidth, CPM, CPC, CTR, etc. As you can see, when you combine measure with duration (day, week, month, season, year), there’s an alphabet’s soup of metrics related to websites. (I’ll discuss some key metrics in an upcoming post.)
Web analytics is the study of website metrics. It’s about watching the trends of metrics day by day or week by week, charting the daily changes, determining average performance (Moving Averages, Multiple Moving Averages), devising trendline analyses (using advanced statistical methods), trying to determine why the metrics are the way they are, and what you might do about it. This ties in directly with the next step in the process, optimization.
Web optimization is the act of devising and implementing a plan to improve your website’s metrics. You’ve measured and analyzed the metrics, and determined the possible (most likely) reason for poor metrics. Maybe you’re not posting enough. Your topic might not have enough interest, or there’s too much competition, or it’s seasonal (e.g., skiing).
Now you need to come up with a plan for improving those metrics, and going ahead and implementing the plan. Optimization is not as exact a science as web analytics, so its a topic of volatile discussion, especially SEO (Search Engine Optimization) and SEM (Search Engine Marketing) processes. Everyone has their own idea of why something happened and what to do about. It’s a matter of how they analyze and interpret the metrics collected.
Methods of optimization include SEO, SEM, visual redesign (page layout), information design, increased content and posting frequency, article marketing (publishing to specific article directory sites), contest promotions on the site, etc.
Regardless of your method, web analytics and optimization is an ongoing process. Each time you to optimize, you have to go back and re-measure and re-analyze your metrics. It’s a cyclic process.
I’ll be talking about web metrics and analytics on this site. Someone has asked me to write about optimization elsewhere. Although I have a lot to learn and that project has not been unveiled yet. I’ll announce when it is revealed.
