CT Biz Blogs

Looking at statistics can be fun, especially about a month after you’ve started blogging. “Someone’s reading my blog — Wahoo!”

But what does it all mean? That’s a whole other question.

I’ve written briefly about two things you need to remember when you look at your blog stats:

• spammers leaving comments (or trying to leave comments) are counted as visitors
• people who won’t accept cookies are being counted as new visitors

There are a lot of ways you can get misinformation from stats, and a lot of ways you can misinterpret your stats.

Stats can tell you some things, when you learn how to interpret them. But today I want to talk about a larger issue:

If you’re a small business, blogging for other reasons besides making money on blog ads, the one thing you really want to know, you won’t be able to learn from your stats!

What’s that, you ask?

How is my blog helping my business?

No way is the number of visitors, amount of time spent on the blog, or articles clicked on going to tell you that.

Why not?

Because blog stats measure one thing: reader behavior.

What they can’t measure is the thing you’re really after: consequences.

What happened as a result of visiting your blog? Did they read any posts? Did they like you more? Did they learn something? Did they hire you?

You can get some of that information, but not directly from your stats.

(Again, I’m not talking about “problogging,” making money from blog ads. That kind of info you can easily get from stats.)

Now, the difference between behavior and consequences can be tricky for people to understand.

It’s like the difference between shooting a gun (behavior) and hitting a target (consequence), or some poor defenseless deer (another consequence). Same behavior, different consequences.

So here’s a few things to realize about stats:

• Articles clicked on (behavior) does not equal articles read (consequence).
• Time spent on a page (behavior) does not equal article read (consequence).
• Visitor to a page (behavior) does not equal new client or customer (consequence).

What does this mean? Just that, in your quest for page rank and unique visitors, please remember that a) stats lie, and b) they’re just a small part of the story.

Update: Be sure to check out Brian Brown’s article: Blogging dos #10: Get statistics for your blog, for the part of the story where stats do come in handy.

Technorati : Statistics