July Month in Review PLUS Tools You Can Use to Track Your Site

Today’s post will feature a long list of new tools I’ve found which you can also use to track your site’s progress. This month alone is different from the others in that it has achieved a few things:

• reached the 100th post
• guest posts were made on Designer’s Digest and A Meaningful Existence
• Diggs and StumbleUpon traffic brought in new visitors

I hope in sharing this with you, you can get a better picture of your site’s overall progress. In turn, it will motivate you to practice the art of blogging. Without further ado, let’s see how this blog performed.

Everything was green across the board this month in Alexa. Woo hoo!!! Most of that came pretty much from you new readers so thank you. Some of the stats are below so you can see more of what the percentages are. Overall, the bounce rate decreased a bit at under 3%.

With the blog going beyond the 3 month period, it enabled Alexa to see more into the demographics.

Take a look below at the stats and see for yourself.

As I mentioned earlier, passing the 3 month range unlocked the demographics analysis for the blog. The age range seems to be more towards the 25-34 year olds, some college level, without kids and are browsing from home.

Along with that, what’s interesting is the upstream/downstream actions for this blog. Upstream meaning the site before they came to the blog and downstream is the site they go after. Take a look at the streams below.

Now let’s head on over to SmartPageRank and take some clips in comparison to last month’s review when I talked about how you can convince someone there’s value with blogging. Take a look as the number of backlinks, indexed pages and value for this blog flew.

Both Alexa and SmartPageRank are showing positive stats. I want to also include their description of this blog. It seems relevant as within one month, anything is possible. What’s interesting is the US rank is pulled and reference in regards to Australia who shows this blog is popular there as well.

These stats are only scratching the surface. Let’s go into Google Analytics and see more of what we can get out there. As I logged into my dashboard, in the visitors section I saw the comparison of the new vs returning. Surprisingly most are new and the blog increased at a whooping 51%.

The next field which peaked my interest further was visitor loyalty. The results here were not surprising because a few great things happened which drove insane amounts of traffic to this blog, most of which only bounced off but is the result of the large amount of percentage of new visitors.

• Kevin over at Designer’s Digest promoted the 7 Link Challenge which brought in over 20+ diggs! Thanks Kevin!
• The guest post at Designer’s Digest entitled Making Ideas Happen – Giveaway.
• Cheryl over at ThatGirlisFunny promoted the 100th Post Giveaway which brought in over 80+ stumbles! Thanks Cheryl!

On average this blog brings in about 17 readers daily. Within visitor loyalty under depth of visit, all the incoming traffic streams with the most visits are displayed. Here’s the breakdown below:

1. RSS feed
2. Direct links from blog commenting
3. StumbleUpon thanks to Cheryl from ThatGirlisFunny
4. BloggersUnite readers from blog post Empowering Disability
5. DoFollow listing
6. Feedburner e-mail
7. Designer’s Digest readers from guest post Making Ideas Happen – Giveaway
8. LinkWithin plugin which displays relevant post below posts
9. John Chow dot Com commenting
10. Feedburner Twitter updates
11. Direct Twitter updates
12. eBlogTip commenting
13. Digg thanks to Kevin from Designer’s Digest

Looks like I’m going to have to work on conversion. As you can see, the number of pageviews is mostly on 1. Those that have viewed the site more than once is on average about 19 which comes from RSS subscribers or Twitter followers.

Finally, under content within top content, I got a picture of what converted best. Over 2000+ views from Jun 27-Jul 27, here are the top converters:

1. Main blog URL
2. 100th post
3. About page
4. How to Restore WordPress post
5. Archive page
6. 7 Link Challenge Response post

More tools to analyze and track your site

When I was experiencing technical difficulties with the deletion of this blog, the site went down. I mentioned about downtime then. While you won’t think of it now, there are a couple of tools which you can use to measure your web host uptime which is important if you’re running it for business later.

UpTimeRobot – Add up to 50 sites to monitor, get updates through e-mail, your cell or even Twitter when your site is down and also when it is back up. Ping is every 5 minutes. No cost. FREE. If you log into the site’s dashboard, you’ll get the see the last 24 hours. Really simple and easy to use for a beginner.

Host-Tracker – Get the average percentage of uptime right to your blog. Monitor your site through a script with a button.  This service is more advice. They have distributed monitors which scours the net to see how your site measures. Reports are more technical. Great for advance monitoring.

Site Meter – With the Basic FREE plan, track your site in real time. By placing a button, you can see the summary and details of your visitors by location, referral sites, entry pages and more. Track the visits to your site by seeing it over time up to a year and even by page views. You can also see the ranking of which page had the most visits. Their reports are really valuable. You get to see how much visits your site gets by the hour! So it’s a great way to see when you actually get traffic to know when’s the best time to post.

WebsiteInDepth – Like SmartPageRank, this browser based FREE analytics tool is unique in that it gets the estimated value of your site. You can vote on content and usability, see your Alexa daily reach, sites close to your IP, geo location, similar sites within range, the DNS info, type of analytics used for tracking and Whois Info. The only drawback is you can only update the statistics once every 15 days. Check out my estimated value.

HubSpot Website Grader – See how your site is doing in terms of SEO and social media. Simply input in your site’s URL, your e-mail address and get a report that displays a grade followed by a detail analysis of your content. There’s over five sections here first starting with your blog’s grade then towards how well you’re optimizing your internal pages, where it’s promoting, any conversion outlets for your site and finally it’s ranking. If you want further advice, you’re taken forward to HubSpot where there is a large plethora of FREE internet marketing information. This is one of my favorites. I came in at a 97. Not bad. Check out the site’s grade below.

Got any more tools I haven’t mentioned worth discovering? Share below.

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