Statistics #2 How to use the “Feedburner Analyze Tools”

Filed under: Internet Marketing

Welcome to the second in a three part series where I will show you some very good analytical tools to track your Blogs traffic and useage details. For our purpose today, I’m going to assume that you already have the Feed Burner RSS feeder that you can get for free at www.feedburner.com installed on your Blog. If not, here is an excellent tutorial by Gideon Shalwick on how to do this. http://www.becomeablogger.com/video-10.html

Now on with learning about how to use the FeedBurner “Analyze’ tools which are for me the most user friendly site tracking tools that I have come to find. And if it’s easy…you might have more of a tendency to use it. I know I do.

1. Go to www.Feedburner.com to set up your FeedBurner Account if you don’t already have one.

2. Click on “My Feeds’ at the top left of the home page.

3. You will be taken to a Page that lists your “Feed Titles”, “Subscribers”, and “Site Visitors”. Click on the number under the “Subscribers” section. Note that if your Feed is new, it might show a “0″, but that’s OK, you can still learn the process.

4. Under the “Analyze” tab you will see several options. We will look at each one separately, but first click on “Subscribers”. There you will see a graph over a time period you select in the Drop Down area to the right. Either “One Day, “All time”, or “Last 7 Days”. I always look at “All Time” because i like to see the “Big Picture” trend.

Here you will see a Graph over the time you have selected that hopefully does or will have an upward trend. If you see a slip down wards, this means you have lost a subscriber. If you setup your FeedBurner feed correctly, you will get an Email notification if someone should inscribe from your Blog. If possible, try to find out why, but you can assume that they became disinterested in some way as to your content, so this might prompt you to really concentrate on better quality writing.

If you go to the area below the Graph, you can see a overview of your “Email Subscriptions Services” where you can click on the “FeedBurner Email Subscriptions” link for details of those individuals who have subscribes to your Blog. This is great data that you can use to add to your Email listing for future outgoing promotions or newsletters.

5. Next scroll down on the right to “Live Hits”, and click on it. This gives you a snapshot over the last 24 hours on how many people have actually clicked on (”Hit”) your Bog site and viewed it in a Web Browser like Google, MSN or yahoo. The more the merrier!

6. Now lets scroll down to the “Item Use” tab on the left of the FeedBurner Stats page. The “Item Use” area shows “Views”, “Clicks” and “Downloads.

“Views” shows which of your items in feeds were clicked on. In other words, which items people clicked through to read. “Clicks’ is simply a post that someone “Clicked” on the title, but didn’t go deeper to read it, and “Downloads” are actually items that people have downloaded from your site. Maybe an article, affiliate product like an Ebook, or some other interesting item.

At the bottom of the “Item Use” page, you will see which of your articles are the most read from top to bottom priority. This is a very easy way for you to judge what the “People” are interested in and might give you some direction on what your future content might include.

7. Looking further below on the FeedBurner Analyze page, we see an “Uncommon Usage” tab. So what is “Uncommon Usage”, well this is how FeedBurner describes it….

“FeedBurner manages hundreds of thousands of feeds and in doing so, we’ve cataloged thousands of common places where feeds are referenced throughout the web. These include email clients, web-based feed aggregators, news filters, and more, each outlined in detailed in the Subscriber section of your Analyze tab.

It has been my experience, tools like www.twitterfeed.com redirect the new activity of my site automatically posting as a Twitter “Tweet” at www.twitter.com every time a new post or comment is made. All of these activities show up in the “Uncommon Usage” section of my FeedBurner stats. This is a great “Re-direction” tool that helps build “Traffic”.

We now want to direct our attention further down the “Analyze” section sidebar to the “Stats” area. Here you will find valuable information on:

1. “Visitors” which is the average number of visitors over a time period you have selected up on the top right of the “Analyze” page.

2. “Pages” which tell you how many visitors actually read your page content.

3. “Incoming” site traffic that shows where Visitors came from to see your site either by doing a “Search” for it, or coming from another site that has you linked on that site. This is a valuable feature because as these numbers rise by category, You can see the difference of people actually searching with “Key Words” to find your site, or if links to your site on other sites are growing in number showing that your “Back Links” are growing.

4. “Outgoing” site traffic which are links on your site (if you have site stats enabled and the code pasted on your Blog pages) that people clicked on, thus showing where they went to next after leaving your site.

Now lets turn our attention the the “Stats” area to wards the bottom of the “Analyze” Keftab page. Here you will find valuable statistics on:

1. “Visitors” to your site an on average daily basis over the time period you have selected above.

2. “Page”traffic for your site which shows activity levels for actual “Readings” of your page content. This is a really good indicator as to how your content “Titles” are working. Always remember to use the “Title” of your article to lure the reader into taking the next action yo desire, and that’s to READ the article!

3. “Incoming” site traffic from either the outside from the search engines where someone found you through your mastery of “Key Words”, and from other locations where they have “Linked” to you so that others can easily access your content that the other Blogger found worthy of linking to. Great job on your content if you are experiencing good growth on visitors from other Blogs!

4. “Outgoing” site traffic shows how many people left your site by clicking on a Link that you have provided to them in your content. This will give you an idea of how many visitors are actually interested in your type of industry. Always try to communicate with the “Other” sites that you are providing links to to do the same for you to help generate that all important “Traffic”.

Well that’s it for the 2nd article in my series on “Statistics”. i hope you have found this information of value and will come back for my final chapter on how to use the “Cpanel Awstats” tools.

For more information on FeedBurner stats, you can click on this link: http://www.google.com/support/feedburner/bin/answer.py?answer=78948&cbid=-8ekefjzn4r5r&src=cb&lev=answer

Success in your journey,