The great thing about software such as Google Analytics is that they can provide website owners lots 
and lots of data regarding their website. At the same time, this is also a bad thing about the likes of Google Analytics, since if you are unsure what to track and how to analyse it, what use is all the data? With this, here are five statistics you should be monitoring on your blog/website, so that you can analyse the performance of it.
Visitors
The number of visitors is the first stat you should be looking at for your website. It gives the best overall picture as to how your website is performing. The more visitors coming to your website, the better.
You can also use visitors as a way to see what the demand is like for the content category of your website. For example, on PoemAnalysis.com, visitor traffic reduces over summer, making clear that summer is a time I can experiment a little/make improvements without affecting the monetization as much as other times in the year.
Bounce Rate
The bounce rate measures the percentage of people that land onto your website without viewing another web page on it. For this reason, it is a very good metric to use to see how good your website is at keeping web users on the website.
If you have a high bounce rate, you can look to improve it through the likes of modifying your website’s theme, as well as improving the content suggestions and internal linking.
Traffic Source
Understanding where your website gets its traffic from is of vital importance, so that you can concentrate on the traffic sources that gain the most amount of traffic for you. For example, you may find the SEO of your websites to bring in the most traffic from search engines. On the other hand, it might be through social media you gain most of your traffic, or directly from people bookmarking the page.
Time on Site
Linked to the bounce rate, the average time on site shows how long people stay on your website, until they click off. The longer web users stay on a website for, the more likely they are to read, comment, and generally interact with your website.
Most Popular Posts
Understanding what type of posts perform the best for you will help to point you in the right direction of making more of them. This is exactly how PoemAnalysis.com was created – AskWillOnline.com (another website of mine) illustrated that the most popular posts were all related to poetry – concentrating on poetry posts would then gain more traffic than other categories.
