If you’ve ever wondered who visits your blog, there’s a fun site you can use to see what your readers are interested in — and what they like most about your site. By placing the invisible code on your site, you’ll get answers to questions like:
- How many people visited my blog today?
- Who links to my blog?
- Does my blog show up in search engines?
- What are my most popular posts?
- Do my readers click on the links I recommend?
And many more. Here’s a quick peek into Statcounter, and what I like most about it!
Summary
How many people visited my blog today? How many were brand new visitors? How many had been here before?
When I first login to Statcounter, I start off by checking the Summary. This lets me know how many people have visited my blog so far today, along with a comparison chart for the past seven (7) days. I can see the number of unique visitors, the number of pages they viewed, and whether or not they were a returning reader.
Popular Pages
What are people looking at on my blog? What are my most popular posts?
Another fun stat to check is Popular Pages. It’s important to note that Statcounter monitors your readers’ behavior in real-time, for the last 500 readers to your blog. This page will tell you what is the most popular post on your blog right now. It may be different if you check back tomorrow, or even later in the day!
Something neat you can do from Popular Pages is click on the little magnifying glass beside one of your posts, then click on Came From in the blue box that appears next. Like the image above, this will show you how your readers are arriving at this particular post. As you can see from the example above, my most popular post gets a lot of traffic from Pinterest, with some hits from Facebook, Stumble Upon, and Google as well.
Came From
How are people finding my blog? Who’s linking to my blog?
Speaking of Came From — this is probably my most favorite feature of Statcounter. Click on Came From in the menu list on the left side, and you’ll see a list of your top referring links. This is how people are finding your blog — you can see who’s linking to and talking about your blog!
Keyword Analysis
Does my blog show up in search engines? What do people search for that leads them to my blog?
Another way readers can find your blog is through search engines like Google, Yahoo, and Bing. By the way, if I was writing this post 15 years ago, I would’ve said “search engines like HotBot, Lycos, and DogPile“. Wonder what the search engines will be 15 years from now! Anyway, Keyword Analysis will show you what search terms readers are using the find your site. Some of them can be quite entertaining! Keyword Analysis sorts the search terms by the most popular terms.
You can also click on Recent Keyword Activity to see a list of search latest search terms used to find your site — with real-time accuracy. What’s neat about this page is you can see if people found your site from a certain search engine, if it was an image search, and how high your blog showed up in the results list. For example, check out the first two results in the screenshot above. This person searched for “30 day shred before and after” on Google and my blog was the 14th result that appeared for them. The next reader searched for “cookie dough oreo brownie” on Google, and my blog was the first result that appeared for them.
Exit Links
Do my readers click on the sites I link to? Are they clicking on links to blogs or products I recommend?
If you’ve shared a link on your blog or in a post, you can view your Exit Link stats to tell if people actually clicked on it. Again, since Statcounter monitors your readers in real-time, this will show what people are clicking on right now. For example, this might be extremely helpful to check if you shared a round-up of links. This will show you the most popular links that people are clicking on, giving you a better idea of what your readers are interested in.
Visitor Paths
What do people do on my blog? What pages do they look at? What links do they click on?
Visitor Paths — now this is a fun one if you’ve ever wondered what people do on your blog! Do they read one page and leave? Do they click around and keep reading? What do they click on? Click on Visitor Paths and it will show you, in order of your most recent visitor, exactly what they did and what they looked at on your blog. For example, the reader above came from a link on Facebook. They landed at the Ultimate Layered Cookie Dough Oreo Brownies page, and from there they kept on clicking! They looked at cookie dough cupcakes, photos of Louie, Savannah, and Mexico. Fun!
Click on the magnifying glass beside a reader on the Visitor Paths page, and you’ll see even more information about this particular reader, like how many times they’ve visited your blog before and how long they stayed on your blog for this visit.
Install
The best part about Statcounter is that it’s super easy to install, and you’ll start seeing your stats right away. When you sign up for an account, all you have to do is click on the blogging platform you have (Blogger, Tumblr, WordPress, etc) and it will walk you through how to install the code with a step-by-step photo tutorial.
Happy Statcounting! :)
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