Kristina Haymes has invited me to comment on the best tools for tracking who’s reading your blog, what’s getting the most attention, and other analytic want-to-knows.

She’s raised an important question, because if you’re not tracking your readers’ and visitors’ habits, you’re missing some terrific opportunities to build readership, increase your visibility, and leverage your ADR blog for greater mediation marketing success.

I know that terms like “metrics” and “analytics,” especially combined with words like “technology” have an effect on some mediators akin to a cold bucket of water thrown on your back while sunbathing. But it’s not all that complicated and you can always find someone to guide you. Here are some resources to get started in your learning about web analytics:

• Visitors to Your Site: Who Are They and What Do They Want: My 2006 discussion of a few of the most popular metrics programs.
• Beginner’s Guide to Interpreting Website Traffic Metrics with Google Analytics: Google Analytics can seem like a behemoth because it’s got so much data. This guide helps you focus on what can be most useful to you and cut the data overwhelm.
• Dig into Your Blog’s Statistics: Be sure to read through the comments to this article as well, since there’s also some good advice there.
• Feedburner Adds BlogBeat to Analytics Menu: Like Mike, I use Google Analytics and Feedburner as my primary metrics programs. Mike’s a terrific blog resource, so if you’re into ADR blogging, I recommend you subscribe to Converstations. And that blog name is just about perfect!
• How to Improve Your Blog Using Feedburner: A good, practical follow-up to Mike’s article.

Hope this provides some starting points, Kristina!

Copyright © 2007 by Tammy Lenski. All rights reserved.
Photo credit: Sanja Gjenero

Liked this post? A few others to consider:

1. Visitors to Your Site: Who Are They and What Do They Want?
2. Why your website needs a good 404 page
3. Protect Sensitive Information on Your Computer: Microsoft Private Folder 1.0
4. Online Forms: Wufoo Makes It Easy to Put Forms on Your Site
5. 4 reasons online networking is valuable for mediators even if your market is local