Blog for a living

Google Analytics is the number one source of information about my blog. Although this site is still very small, so it updates only once every day, it still provides very valuable information about my visitors, my traffic sources and about my content as well. I won’t go into details here, cause you probably all know its basic funcions, but what I’m going to talk about is Analytics’ Benchmarking feature.

Benchmarking is an easy way to compare your blog to other sites in your niche, and you can analyze it so you’ll know exactly what to improve in order to pass your competition.

It’s located under Visitors/Benchmarking. When you click on it, you’ll see six attributes of your blog on the right: visits, bounce rate, pageviews, avg. time on site, Pages/Visit and New Visitors number. Basic stuff. But now you see another grey line in the graphs besides yours. It represents all the other sites’ average performance in that particular category.

Now, why did I write that in Italic? Because it looks cool of course, and because it’s not the whole picture: Google Analyics divides websites into three sizes: small, medium and large. You compare your site only to the size you’re currently in. For me it’s obviously the small one. But where are the boundaries of each group, honestly, I have no idea, and I’d love to hear if anyone knows anything about sizing in more detail.

But I think it’s not that important for us anyway. What’s important that while you cannot select the size of your blog, you can select the appropriate category you’re blogging about, so you can see how you’re doing compared to others in the same topic.
To select a category, simply click on the “open category list” link above the charts, and choose the right topic for your blog (click to enlarge). Mine was in the Social networks & Online Communities / Blogging Resources & Services as you can see.

My Benchmarking page

The other sites’ average for each attribute is displayed under the charts like Benchmark: x visits….

Now let’s see what this information can tell us with my example:

1. Visits: As you can see I’m slightly above the average, which isn’t that bad considering this blog was launched only 6 days ago. There’s nothing to worry about here.

2. Bounce rate*: Now this looks awful. That’s the point where you must ask yourself the question: why? Is it your fault or not? If yes, how can you solve the problem?
So I go into Traffic/Traffic sources  and I check each source’s bounce rate. It turns out that my Entrecard-traffic’s ( which is my main source of traffic at the moment) bounce rate is like 90%, and the other source’s bounce rate is surprisingly 0%! (I have only one other 50%). So it looks like those who didn’t come just to drop a card on me quickly might actually like what I’m wriing here. And I stop for a moment and it feels good
What about Entrecarders? Well, I didn’t expect much from this service anyway, that’s just the way it goes, they come, drop and leave. I don’t think I can do much about it, but I might seriously consider a most popular widget under the Entrecard dropbox to get their attention and improve my statistics a bit.

3. Pageviews: Nothing special here, with only a few posts up on the site and with almost 150% above the comptetition I have nothing to complain about.

4. Avg. time on site: Not too bad, not too good. Again, I have only a few posts, we’ll see what happens in the future. Moral: write, write, write! Although it’s astonishing how poor the other sites perform here (+400%!!!). Those damn Entrecards, eh?

5. Pages/visit: Again, I have to write more frequently. I’ll keep that in mind. And still, only 4% below…

6. New visits: 50% plus, not surprising, since it’s a new blog, I’ll do some promoting in the next few days anyway.

A few thoughts in the end:

As you can see, you can harvest some quality imformation here, and you can understand your blog better, both the “whys” and the “hows”.
But keep in mind you can’t know how accurate this information is. Google says there are a least 100, but up to hundreds of thousands of sites in comparison. You can’t know the quality of them, only that you’re in the same sized category.

Also keep in mind that your goal is not to beat the competition. Do not compare your blog to others only. Always do the best you can, regardless of how much better you seem to be.
If you’re behind in some areas, however, that’s a good starting point to improve.

Hope you liked this little overview, should you have any questions please feel free to ask in a comment or contact me directly.
I’m also interested how your blog performs in Analytics Benchmarking, please let me know :).

*
P.S.: I talked a lot about bounce rates. If you’re not familiar with the term, you can read about it here.

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