Web Analytics & Tracking
If you have a website or a blog then you should know about web analytics. You can learn a lot about your site, what works, and what doesn't if you take a look at your stats on a frequent basis. Most hosting companies provide some kind of stats software, but I recommend adding Google Analytics to your site in order to get a complete picture of what your visitors are doing and where they came from. Best of all, it's FREE to use!
Here are a few metrics that I think everyone should keep a close eye on. There are countless of different options in the Google Analytics back end that you can track, but don't get bogged down in spending too much time back there. However, if you are paying for any advertising I would track the ROI on those campaigns, but that's a topic for another day so let's get started with this simple list.
Visitors
This is the most basic metric to monitor. With all things being equal if you get more traffic then that should mean your site will make more money right? If your goal is to keep increasing your general traffic numbers then you should continue to make more money from your site.
Pageviews
This is how many pages your visitors are looking at. Increasing the number of pageviews will increase the "eyes" on advertisements which will help you charge more for your space. Linking to relevant posts at the end of each article is a great way to increase the pageviews on your site as your visitors spend more time looking at your content.
Referring Sites
Who is linking to you and how much traffic are they generating for you by doing so? If you get a lot of traffic from a link then maybe you should think about partnering up with that site or writing a guest post for them. If you are doing advertising then tracking click through traffic lets you know if it's generating a positive return on your investment.
Keywords
How are your visitors finding you in the search engines? Google the keywords found in this section of your analytics to see where you rank in the results. A few more internal links to that page could boost you up a few spots in the results and bring you even more traffic than you are already getting.
You will also find topics to write about and areas that you might want to focus on when you see which keywords visitors used to find you. For long tail keywords you can rewrite some of your content to include those phrases and see a boost for those terms as well. There are lots of things you can do from an SEO standpoint if you keep an eye on the keywords people are using to find you.
What other metrics do you track? This list is pretty basic but I think it covers the most important stats to look for.
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