31 Day Challenge - Being a Statistician

Today our task is to analyze our blog's statistics; through Google Analytics, we have the ability to examine all sorts of data, including the number of hits our blog receives, the popularity of certain posts over others, where our readers are coming from, etc.

What I learned from our stats:

• Our number of daily visits has grown exponentially since our blog first started. Duh. Although this may sound quite obvious, it is always good to know that we aren't blogging to an audience consisting solely of our 3 member blog team. Also, knowing we have a growing list of visitors will only encourage us to blog more consistently and have our content be useful and engaging.
  

• Most visitors are referred from our organization's website, although being a part of the Better Blog 31 Day Challenge has resulted in a large number of referrals from other blogs, especially Michele Martin's The Bamboo Project. Other large referral sources are the Google search engine and Blogger.com.
  

• Our bounce rate is embarrassingly high, and I'm not sure why this is, as I have perused Darren Rowse's tips for making your blog more "sticky" and we already follow most of his recommendations. For those not down with the blogosphere lingo, a bounce rate tracks how many people arrive at our blog and then leave right away without viewing much. Lower bounce rates are better. So, in order to decrease this stat, we need to make our blog more "sticky," i.e. do something differently in order to keep readers hooked on our blog. Perhaps I could follow Darren's advice to break our longer posts into series of posts. Also, as discussed at length in our Day 6 task, we should really try to make our blog more interactive and less like a news feed.

Although my day-to-day work centers more around with people who have a nicotine addiction, this particular task might just have brought a new form of addiction to my attention: I spent roughly two hours playing around with our Google Analytics stats...