Blogging Tips: Curious about where your ‘view traffic’ is coming from?

by: Ronovan

 

“I don’t care where it comes from as long as I get it!”

 

That’s the attitude of most or at least many of those with websites, depending on the purpose of the site. If you are just wishing to share your creativity, then this article is not for you. This article is for those wanting to increase viewership and perhaps their online presence for professional reasons or maybe even just curious about where and how people find them.

 

For those falling into the second category, the following I give you in response to the “I don’t care…” comment.

 

“Seriously? Seriously? I can’t believe you thought that.”

 

Maybe it’s the former data analysis guy in me, yeah, I did that too on top of having been a teacher and other things…cry with me now…okay now on with the show, but I want to KNOW.

 

You want to grow your readership like a web, not a straight line. By straight line I mean with only one source of followers/readers/viewers. This can mean just your friends or family or fellow bloggers. You want ALL of that and more. With a web you don’t depend on one type of viewer.

 

On your WordPress Stats page you can see under Referrers where your visitors are coming from. It may be;

• Reader
• Dashboard
• Twitter
• Or even a link on another bloggers page.

 

For those who are striving for web presence, you need to know these things.

 

REFERRERS information

You can view this information by;

• Current Day
• Yesterday
• Summaries. Within Summaries you have other time span options.

 

If I click on my ‘All time’ option, which is my entire blog history, I can see that the WordPress.com Reader and Twitter are basically tied for first place in Referrers with dailypost.wordpress.com and WordPress Dashboard almost tied for third.

 

If I look at the ‘7 Days’ option I see that dailypost.wordpress.com is first, Twitter is second, and WordPress.com Reader is third.

 

I know why dailypost.wordpress.com reader is in first with a huge increase. I started the Writing 101 Blogging University this past Monday and participants post links to their assignments on a certain page for others to click and see.

 

I look at both big picture and little picture to see how things have been and how things are recently. If my Reader response is dying off, I have to determine why. If Twitter is dying, then why is it?

 

Twitter

If you use Twitter you can also see if your Tweets are generating clicks back to your articles.

1. Go to the ‘gear’ in the upper right corner of the screen, click and then click Analytics
2. You can then look at each Tweet and see the number of clicks that each resulted in, within the body of the Tweet in the first column, how many Faves you received, Retweets, and Replies. You may also see something that says 4XNormal Reach or some other number. That means you reached that much more of your normal audience with that Tweet due to ReTweets (RT).

 

There are more data options to view but these are the Twitter options I want to look at for our purpose today.

This information can help you look at when things happen and what content you put out that either increased or decreased your site traffic. I’m not saying you should write to increase traffic, unless that is your purpose. If that is your purpose then you need to use what you have available to you.

 

If you look at my categories and offerings you will see I am random and just write whatever comes to mind. But some want to keep their site within a certain theme. In the Analytics of Twitter you can even see the interests by percentage of your Followers to see if you are reaching the people you want to reach. But that is for another article another time.

 

Write and create for you and as long as it is honest creativity you WILL find your audience.

(I would have included images of my traffic numbers but they are so much lower than everyone else’s that I didn’t.)

© Copyright-All rights reserved-RonovanWrites.wordpress.com-June 08, 2014.