As you get into blogging, you’ll notice peaks and troughs in your blog statistics. These variations are usually there for a reason, but can be hard to uncover at first. Variations in your blogging statistics can make your heart skip a beat when you first see them – sometimes for good reasons and sometimes not!!
Here are two of the main reasons you can see variations in your blog statistics
Traffic Source
The first thing to look at is your traffic source. Do the sites that refer you traffic vary much from day to day? If you regularly participate in link ups, it’s common for your traffic to be higher on those days as people visit from the link up to comment. Other days, you might be getting traffic from forums, Google searches – it’s worth knowing where you get traffic from most of the time.
Visitors
What type of visitors are coming to your site? Repeat visitors? New ones? If, like me, you don’t sign into Google Analytics very often, you’ll probably notice the difference in repeat vs new visitors by the comments. On my personal blog, I tend to get comments from either brand new visitors, or people who always comment. I (usually) get more comments that I have participated in a link up. If your traffic is coming from a new source or Google constantly, ask yourself what you can do to get the visitors to stay. Do you have a newsletter they can sign up for? Are the posts that Google sends them to very polished and helpful on the topic that caused them to arrive at your blog?
Do you know what causes variations in your blog statistics?