Question about Reliable Ways to Measure Blog Traffic Growth

I use Google and Feedburner...both are great for quantifying numbers...also, your blogging software may have it's own stats package. I don't know why the two would read differently...do they both place bits of tracking code in your blog? I know that Google does, and that leads to accurate numbers. Any site that doesn't, is only offering guesstimates.

I would also recommend Feedburner.

There are many metrics to monitor for growth of a blog. Looking at traffic numbers is only one point. Time on site (I.E. visit duration) is critical.

In order to provide a worthwhile metric, you must first identify the goals you have, the audience you want to reach, and your niche targets for penetration. If you have already saturated an audience, growth becomes a matter of increasing frequency and duration.

Here are some tools you can use:

Compete.com is a good place to analyze yourself against several like-minded sites.

Quantcast allows you to see additional information you (or competitors) have for demographics, as well as where visitors are wandering.

Exactfactor.com allows you to track your search engine keywords for free.

Quarkbase.com allows you to see traffic patterns across Alexa, Compete, Blog Reactions, and several social media sites (Digg / Stumble / etc)

Hi Nancy,

Personally I have found that Google Analytics is not reliable. Some webhosting comes with AWstats which I find to be quite accurate.

103bees is another good service which will give you some nice info like which keywords on Google or Yahoo brought you the visitors (also which Google or yahoo, US, Uk, etc)

Also, for your blog I recommend joining mybloglog - for 3$ a month you get really good stats and also will attract more visitors.

Hi Nancy,

Thank-you! I think you will be really impressed with the data from mybloglog and 103bees.

I'm not sure if you are familiar with Jack Humphrey's site but there is a ton of amazing info on blog traffic here: http://www.jackhumphrey.com/fridaytrafficreport/

If you go to the sitemap page you can quickly see the posts, there are 22 pages of them and Jack is one of the top experts.

cheers, Jason

Hi Nancy, My blogs are hosted on Wordpress and I use StatCounter - it offers a more detailed view than the analytics provided by Wordpress. You can check it out here: http://www.statcounter.com/ Kelly

Kelly Lenihan, KSL Designs: Web Design for the Visionary Entrepreneur [http://www.ksldesigns.net]

Hi Nancy,

This is a great question! I find that people often overlook the obvious when measuring blog traffic growth. It is not so much in how many people travel by, but in the number of people that stop and stay. I have a blog ranked between 75K - 100K in Technorati (depending on the day!). Out of millions of blogs and only one year of blogging, I am happy. Now, I judge blog growth by comments, repeat comments, and creating a network of people. After all, isnt that why you have a blog? Gain a following!

Here is why different counters will give you different numbers. There is a broad definition of "visitors" or "hits". A visitor/hit could be a new visitor, a returning visitor, a new page view, or a page view including all the various photos and resources also loaded, or spiders and bots that constantly run around the Internet collecting information. Clearly, you have to know exactly what your analytics tool is telling you. Oh, and did I mention cookies. Different browsers have different settings for cookies and this will also change your statistics. Here is my recommendation: find one tool such as Google analytics (in my opinion the best) and stick with it. When you use an analytics tool you are not measuring an actual number you can count on, rather you are looking for trends and comparisons.