Understanding Blog Terms and Traffic Statistics

Using a blog statistic tracking tool, you can learn who is visiting your blog, what pages and posts they're looking at and how long they're staying on your blog. By analyzing your blog stats, you can determine where your promotion efforts are working, so you know where to increase your efforts and where to decrease your efforts. However, before you can make sense of your blog stats, you have to understand the terminology used by blog stat trackers.

Visits

The number of visits displayed in your blog stats shows the number of times anyone entered your blog during a given time period. Each entry is counted once.

Visitors

Visitors are harder to track than visits because unless users have to register to enter your blog, it is nearly impossible to not double-count repeat visitors. Even if a stat tracker uses cookies to determine whether or not a person who comes to your blog has been there before, it's highly possible that the person may have deleted their cookies since their last visit to your blog. That means the stat tracker would think the person is a new visitor and will count him or her again. With that in mind, visits are a more acceptable measurement tool for bloggers to determine the popularity of their blogs.

Hits

A hit is counted every time a file downloads from your blog. That means each time a page is accessed on your blog, every file that has to download on that page counts as a hit. For example, if a page on your blog includes your logo, an ad, and an image in your blog post, then you'll get four hits from that page — one for the page itself, one for the logo, one for the image, and one for the ad because each file has to download to the user's browser. With this in mind, hits are not used to determine the popularity of your blog since they are always much higher than actual traffic.

Page Views

Page views are the standard measurement of blog popularity and traffic in the blogosphere because that's the statistic online advertisers look at. Each visitor on your blog will view a certain number of pages during their visit. They might see one page then leave, or they might click on link after link viewing a variety of posts, pages and more. Each of the pages or posts that the visitor sees is considered a page view. Advertisers want to know how many page views a blog gets because each page view creates another opportunity for a consumer to see (and possibly click on) the advertiser's ads.

Referrers

Referrers are the other websites (and specific pages) online that are sending visitors to your blog. Referrers could be search engines, other sites that have linked to yours, other blogrolls, blog directories, links in comments, social bookmarks, links in forum discussions and more. Each link to your blog creates an entry point. By reviewing the referrers in your blog stats, you can find out which websites or blogs are sending the most traffic to your blog and focus your promotion efforts accordingly.

Keywords and Keyword Phrases

By reviewing the list of keywords and keyword phrases in your blog stats, you can learn what keywords people are typing into search engines that allow them to find your blog. You can focus on those keywords in future posts and advertising and promotional campaigns to further boost traffic to your blog.

Bounce Rate

The bounce rate shows you what percentage of visitors are leaving your blog immediately after arriving at it. These are people who do not feel your blog is providing the content they're looking for. It's good to monitor where your bounce rate is particularly high and modify your marketing efforts around sites that are sending traffic that doesn't stay on your blog for more than a few seconds. Your goal is to create meaningful traffic and loyal readers, so adjust your marketing planaccordingly to focus on efforts that drive traffic with a lower bounce rate.