WordPress® All-in-One For Dummies®

Chapter 3: Understanding Analytics

In This Chapter

• Understanding how analytics can tell you about your blog
• Choosing an analytics-tracking option
• Deciphering analytics terminology
• Working with Google Analytics
• Analyzing your WordPress blog posts with PostRank

Every business on the face of the Earth needs to figure out what works and what doesn't if it wants to succeed. Bloggers often know basic statistics about their blogs, such as the current number on their hit counters or how many people subscribe to their blogs. However, these stats just give you the big picture, and they don't really address why something is or isn't working.

You need to get at least a basic understanding of analytics if you want to leverage your blog to the fullest. The data provided by free programs such as Google Analytics can really help you grow as a blogger. In this chapter, we look at incorporating various data-measuring tools into your WordPress installation, deciphering what the data is telling you, and determining how to act on it.

Google Analytics provides you with a tremendous amount of information on your content. The goal of this chapter is to help you interpret the data, understand where your traffic is coming from, understand which of your content is the most popular among your visitors, know how to draw correlations between various data sets, and use this information to shape the content you write. This process may sound very geeky and accountant-like, but in reality, it gives you a road ...