Every page-owner or website contributor out there wants to know that their content engages readers.  Understandably, most writers wouldn't write if they weren't sure that people were, in fact, reading their material.

That being said, understanding the traffic that comes to your site is critical to your sites success.

Today, we'll look exclusively at blogs.

Blogs continue to act as a powerful tool for information sharing on an interactive social platform.  That said, looking at the traffic that explore your posts can help you to develop functional and interesting content for your readers.  For example, if you find that posts regarding tutorials and videos perform better in terms of site views than text-heavy informational research posts, you can use this information to guide the drafting of future posts. We, for one, found that our blog post The Social Media Take on ROI:Reach, Opportunity, Impact performed extremely well with our viewers. Now we know that providing our readers with specific information on tracking and analyzing social impact is crucial if we would like to continue to retain our audience.

How to Determine Accurate Data

So how should you go about gathering the most accurate analytics regarding the traffic to your blog? It begins with understanding how the traffic page views are tracked.

Google Analytics

Google analytics, our favorite method for tracking traffic at Blue Archer, is arguably the most accurate statistics available on the web for page views. It uses a method involving cookies on the specific user's browser.

[An html cookie] is a parcel of text sent back and forth between a web browser and the server it accesses" - Google Developers blog

Basically, the point of cookies is to be able to distinguish between individual users; it recognizes between web browsers and web servers. They are used "to differentiate one user from another and to pass information from page to page during a single user's website session".  

The problem with Blogger Analytics

Unlike Google Analytics, Blogger analytics does not take the cookies into account when calculating the traffic number. By eliminating cookies from the equation, blogger analytics cannot exclude the automated computer programs and bots which index content for search engines.

If you are using Blogger analytics and you wish to receive more accurate information, command it to eliminate the page counts for your own blog views. This will also help with more accurate information because it will no longer track the "preview" pages when you are editing a post.

To do this is simple:

• When you log into your blogger account and click to view the statistics, under page views just check the box that states "don't track your own page views".

Know any other useful traffic tracking analytic tools or programs appropriate for looking at site-user behavior on blogs? Let us know by leaving a comment below.