Whether you’re an experienced blogger or a newbie, you need to understand your blog traffic. The best way to do that is by tracking it over time. So in this post, I’m breaking down why you should do that, as well as how you can grow your blog if you track blog traffic over time. Finally, I’m sharing a FREE blog traffic tracker, which you can download without signing up for anything.

Before we get into all that, what does “track blog traffic” even mean? It means regularly looking at your blog’s statistics, from page views to bounce rate to social media follower count. You can’t get a full picture of things unless you’re regularly looking at it. I’m not saying you need to look every day; in fact, you probably shouldn’t do that. But even if you look at all your blog’s information once a month, that can really help you. Let’s talk about how!

This post contains affiliate links. Thank you for supporting Kate the (Almost) Great! 

Why Should I Track Blog Traffic? 

It’s one way to measure success – Everyone will have a different thing that makes them feel like their blog is a success. 

For some people, it’s being able to quit their 9-5 job to work on their blog. 

For others, it’s going viral. 

For other people, it’s winning awards. 

For some people, it’s all of the above. 

Most of these things, though, require understanding your blog traffic, so you need to be tracking it. 

Additionally, your page views and social media followers can count as success! Maybe your goal is to have your average monthly page views be 20,000, or maybe it’s 50,000 or something higher (or lower!). For a lot of people, success is having high blog traffic.

My method for running a successful blog with limited time to work on it

It’s required for sponsored work – This applies to basically every type of sponsored work, whether it be through an agency or by pitching to companies. People want to know what your reach is if they’re going to work with you! 

If you are using an agency or middle-man company (like Activate of Sway), they generally require you to connect your Google Analytics account in order to match you with sponsored opportunities. That way, they can make sure that bloggers aren’t faking their statistics to get sponsored opportunities. 

If you’re worried about security risks by doing this, you should know that after you authorize these companies to look at your statistics, you will get an email from Google letting you know that someone authorized it. So if you get an email about that when you didn’t recently authorize anyone, let them know.

As for sponsored opportunities that either go directly to your inbox or are from pitching a company, you might be asked to verify your statistics. I wouldn’t recommend giving these people your Google Analytics login – it’s not as safe as doing it through a company that uses technology and firewalls to do it – but you can send screenshots or share your screen if you’re on a video call. I personally use screenshots from my Google Analytics and my hosting company’s sites on my media kit!

How to use Google Analytics to track your blog traffic

It helps you understand your readers better – You can learn so much about your readers by tracking your blog traffic over long periods of time. 

You can learn where in the world they’re reading your blog. 

You can learn what types of posts they’re reading. 

You can learn how many repeat readers you have. 

You can learn where they’re finding your blog. 

You can learn how many people are reading multiple blog posts when they read your blog (aka the bounce rate) and how long they’re spending on your blog. 

You can learn what type of device they’re reading on – computer, mobile, or tablet. 

Basically, tracking your blog traffic can help you be a better blogger. On that note, let’s talk about how to increase blog traffic by tracking blog traffic.

8 ways to lower your bounce rate

How To Get Your Blog Traffic by Tracking 

The points above are not the only reasons to track your blog traffic! Another (big) reason is that tracking can help you get more blog traffic. Here are 5 ways to grow your blog traffic by tracking it over time!

Use the results to figure out what types of posts are popular (or unpopular) with readers – Once you’ve been blogging long enough that you have 20 or so blog posts published, you’ll be able to understand the trends better. (Honestly, I think you’ll get the most benefit from a minimum of 50 posts, but I recognize that might be asking people to pause on using data for a while.) 

Looking at your popular posts will help you figure out what types of posts are best for your audience. This can mean what specific topics do well with your readers, but it can also mean the structure of your posts. Are round-ups high performing? Do readers like your posts with free downloads? Alternatively, are posts about your personal life getting a surprising amount of traffic? 

These results can also show you what posts are unpopular with readers. That way, you’re not putting time and energy into posts that your readers don’t like. If you really like writing certain posts, and people don’t love them, then keep writing them anyway. But tracking your blog traffic can help you see what posts are popular over time so you can write more of them and get more traffic.

Focus your energy and time on sources that are bringing you traffic instead of ones that aren’t – Similarly, tracking your blog traffic can help you figure out where you’re getting your traffic from, and where it’s worth spending time to get more traffic. There are a couple different ways to look at this.

The first example that comes to mind is Pinterest. Pinterest is a huge source of traffic for a lot of bloggers, myself included. If you’re not getting a lot of traffic from there, then you want to learn more about how to use it. 

Pinterest brings me 75-90% of my blog traffic. I knew a lot about it, but I wanted to increase my traffic, so I took the course Pinterest with Ell. I learned so much from that course – way more than I thought that I would. If you are a beginner Pinterest user, a beginner blogger, or even an expert blogger, there is a lot of great information in there. Before I took that course, I was getting 50-60% of my traffic from Pinterest. Once I started implementing it, I started getting 65-80%, and now I get close to 90%. It completely changed how I use Pinterest. 

On the other hand, if you’re not getting a lot of traffic from a particular source, you might go the opposite route and stop focusing so much energy on that source. This will depend on what that source is. Maybe it’s just not a source conducive to sending traffic to your blog. Maybe you’re spending too much time on it for too little payoff. It will depend on what the source in question is, how much time you’re spending on it, and how much traffic it’s bringing you. 

How to get blog traffic from Pinterest | How I manage social media for my blog

Decide what type of content you make based on where in the world (or country) your readers are – This is something that I’ve done a lot of! I am in the US, on the Eastern coast, and in New England. These are all things that affect my blog traffic. 

In 2021 so far, 73.52% of people who read my blog were in the US, and 5.35% were in Canada. 

Of the Americans, 40.16% were definitely in my timezone. I know this because Google Analytics breaks down the state people are in. Of the Canadians, 6.69% were definitely in my time zone. 

Of the people in Massachusetts, 33.65% were in Boston and the immediate Boston area (such as Cambridge or Somerville). 

Knowing this information has informed my decisions around what to post and when to share my posts. I don’t write as many posts about Boston as I used to because I don’t have a huge Boston audience. I mean, Massachusetts doesn’t even break the top 10 states in my audience from the last 5 months. 

Additionally, knowing where in the world my readers are has helped me when it comes to promoting posts. As I’ve mentioned, when I schedule promotions for my blog posts on Twitter and Facebook, I focus my promotions mostly between 7 AM and 7 PM my time. But I also schedule 2-3 posts overnight for people that are in different time zones. 

Figure out what strategies are or aren’t working for your blog – I stopped doing monthly blog traffic reports this year (because they took up a lot of time and weren’t super popular), but for years, I focused on one big tool a month to try and grow my blog traffic. This helped me a lot because for most strategies, you can’t do a thing once and then start raking in traffic. Focusing on one main strategy a month also helped me figure out if that strategy actually impacted my blog instead of trying a bunch of things at once and not being able to tell what helped and what didn’t. 

There are so many strategies out there, and they’re not all going to work for every blog. You don’t want to spend a lot of time on one strategy if it’s not going to help you. By tracking your blog traffic, you can better analyze what helps, what hurts, and what doesn’t change anything.

Understand the natural rhythms of your blog traffic – Tracking your blog traffic will help be able to understand what time(s) of the year you naturally get more traffic and what time(s) you naturally get less traffic. 

For most bloggers, traffic dips over the summer because people are on the Internet less often. Some people are traveling, some are outside, some are just busy doing things. 

Because I’ve tracked my blog traffic for the better part of the last 6 years, I know to expect this. My traffic often dips starting around Memorial Day and it generally improves after Labor Day. Do I love it? No. But I know that it happens, so I know not to stress too much about it. 

But depending on what niche your blog is, there might be other times of the year that your blog traffic typically decreases or increases. Tracking your traffic over time will help you understand when that might be. 

The Blog Tools I Use and Love

Free Blog Traffic Tracker 

Before I share the free blog traffic tracker download that I use, I want to talk about some free ways to monitor your blog traffic.

Google Analytics – Google Analytics is a free web analyzer tool made by, you guessed it, Google. It doesn’t just track info from Google; it also tracks views and users who have found my blog through Yahoo and Bing! Not to mention social media networks, websites that mention it, and basically everywhere online.

As of 2019, Analytics is the most-widely used web analytics service online (x). It’s not a service; it’s the service. And it’s definitely not blog-specific. Tiny blogs, gigantic websites, and everything in between use Analytics.

Moz summarizes it well by saying, “Do you have a blog? Do you have a static website? If the answer is yes, whether they are for personal or business use, then you need Google Analytics” (x). Moz points out that Google Analytics will help you figure out how many people use your website, where in the world they are, where your traffic is coming from, the most popular pages on your site, and more.

I share different ways you can use Google Analytics, as well as how I personally use it, in this post.

Google Analytics for WordPress by MonsterInsights – If you have self-hosted WordPress, this is the plugin for connecting Google Analytics. “The best Google Analytics plugin for WordPress. See how visitors find and use your website, so you can keep them coming back” (GAFWP). 

It’s super easy to use, and to understand. By using this plugin, you won’t have to worry that you’ve messed up your statistics by putting the Google Analytics code in the wrong place or that you’ve done something wrong in general. 

Evernote – I use Evernote for keeping track of a lot of different components of blogging, and one of those components is keeping track of the things that affect my blog traffic. 

Evernote is basically an online notebook, or binder of notebooks. You create notes and store them in notebooks (basically folders), and you can then access them anywhere you have the app, including if you have the desktop version.

I have 1 note for each year that I’ve been tracking my blog traffic, so that those notes don’t get super long. These notes are actually the thing I use when building my annual roundup of blog tools to try!

As well as tracking the things I’ve tried for growing blog traffic, these notes also include things that have happened that affect my traffic overall. So not only do I write “Tried SEO course” or “made new free download,” but I also include things like “had infusion and took a week off” and “featured a guest post”. (PS – As a whole, I don’t post guest posts any more, so please don’t email me asking for one!)

This sort of thing is helpful for looking back once you have data. If I lost a bunch of traffic around when Google changed their algorithm, then they’re probably connected. Similarly, if I gained a bunch of traffic after writing a post that was featured somewhere, I’ll know that, as well. 

Contrary to some pins on Pinterest, blog traffic doesn’t get really high really quickly (and stay high) without a lot of work going into it. But you shouldn’t have to spend time on things that aren’t helpful, and tracking your blog traffic can help with that.

Why your blog isn’t getting traffic

Free blog traffic tracker by me 

After all this build-up, let’s talk about the free blog traffic tracker that I’ve made for my readers. 

It’s a Google doc, so what you need to do to use that for yourself is open that link, click File, and then click Make a Copy. If you don’t have a Google account but you have Excel, you can click File, click Download, and choose the format to download it (such as Microsoft Excel). 

Now that we’ve covered that, let’s talk about what is in that free tracker and why it’s there. 

Blog Platform Stats vs. Google Analytics Stats

I’ve included columns for these different types of statistics because it’s always good to see how these are similar or different. Personally, I look at my WordPress statistics more than my Google Analytics ones. While Google Analytics is more important, it’s good to be aware of both types of stats. 

Average Stats

As you’ll see under the header row, there are 2 rows for average statistics. The first one is the average of the last 3 months. I include that because I’ve been tracking my stats for 6 years so I want to be able to look at my most recent stats easily. I go with an average because every website is going to have periods when it has more traffic and periods when it has less. It’s good to look at the average. 

The 3-month average columns should be done manually, and averages aren’t needed for social media statistics. For social media, you want to look at the most recent number of followers. 

The next row is for the all-time average. I’ve added formulas for those statistics because that reduces the likelihood of human error. 

On the other hand, you will want to update the formulas once you have more than 50 rows of data. Currently, they’re set to do the average of rows 4 through 50. The formula is =AVERAGE(F4:F50), so just change that F50 to F100 or F200. (F in this case is for Column F.)

Social Media

Columns H-M are for social media. Just input what your total number of followers are for the day that you’re recording data. 

How Often Should I Update This? 

Personally, I update my tracker every 5 or so days. I do this because I don’t want to do it more frequently or else I’ll probably get too invested in the numbers. 

“But Kate, isn’t that the whole point?” Kind of. But I don’t want to get so into the numbers that I care more about them than I do the content or the readers. 

Tracking my blog traffic every 5 days is infrequent enough for me to not get too attached to them, but it’s frequent enough that I’m not out of the loop. 

Other Notes 

There are a couple other things I do personally when using this tracker. 

One is that I always bold the row that is data on the 1st of the month. This makes it easier for me to find the start of each month, which is important to do because I’m currently using over 400 rows in my tracker. 

Another is that I keep track of the best numbers for each type of statistics by turning that cell bright yellow. I say “best number” instead of “highest number” because for the bounce rate, you want as low a number as possible. Sometimes, the best number will be the day that I’m inputting the data. For example, I currently have the most email subscribers that I’ve ever had, so the cell for 5/16/21 in the email newsletter column is bright yellow. On the other hand, the lowest bounce rate I’ve ever had is from last June, so the cell from that day is the one highlighted yellow in that column. 

Finally, I hide old rows. Like I mentioned, I have over 400 rows of data. I want to keep it all so that I can look at my all-time average numbers, but I don’t want to look at it every time I open that document.  

Get the free blog traffic tracker I use here.

Want more free downloads? Sign up for the weekly newsletter for access to the free resource library.

I hope this has helped you out in some way! I have found tracking my blog traffic immensely helpful over the years, and I’m sure it can help you, too. What’s most important is that you find some way of tracking that works for you and your working style, but I find that free tracker extremely helpful. 

How do you track your blog traffic? 

Like this post? Check out: 

Your Guide to Making and Using a Media Kit as a Blogger, 12 Tips for New Health Bloggers, Getting Smart with an Editorial Calendar for Bloggers + Free Editorial Calendar, 50+ Incredible Free Blog Resources