Web Analytics for Bloggers
Professional bloggers know that web analytics is an indispensable tool for identifying audience and attracting advertisers.
A passion for writing can yield serious income for professional bloggers, particularly those in a well-positioned niche. Depending on the country and niche, the highest earners on the higher end of the spectrum achieve €10'000 per month and, in exceptional cases, even $500,000 per year.
According to Indeed the average remuneration ranges from $37k and $63k, depending on the niche. It is not quite as much as high-end outliers, but it is still a significant income, especially for a location independent professional such as a blogger.
To earn that much, you need to optimize your monetization strategies. Here are two reasons why you need web analytics and how they will help you grow your audience and income.
Why Your Blog Needs Web Analytics
Web analytics is essential for a professional blogger for two reasons.
- To develop a more profound understanding of the audience.
- To show advertisers how much traffic there is.
How Web Analytics Help is Building Audience
First, you have to pick a niche. We aren't experts in this domain. There are much more experienced folks offering advice on this subject. For example, Niche Site Lady.
Once you have your niche and draft an initial strategy based on your research, you will want to understand if the work clicked with your audience. Or, even before, if you even have an audience at all.
To promote your blog, you will publish and share your posts and links to posts in various places. You will want to publish a link regularly on social media such as Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn.
You might also consider syndication on Medium, LinkedIn, and other platforms.
Success of these efforts, and eventually engaged and loyal readership, will depend on:
- addressing the right audience, and
- delivering value to the reader.
A right tool, for example a reliable web analytics such as Wide Angle Analytics, will help to classify each marketing channel and associate it with an engaging content, thus arriving at a winning formula.
By looking at the source of traffic vs time spent on the article, you can put visitors in one of the four buckets:
- low visit count; low engagement
- low visit count; high engagement
- high visit count; low engagement
- high visit count; high engagement
The fourth quadrant is the most desired place to be, but both quadrant 2 and quadrant 3 have their benefits.
Let's discuss these in more details.
Low visit count and low engagement
This situation requires a major rethink of the strategy adopted thus far. It does not work. The solution will strongly depend on your niche. Clearly, neither the distribution channel nor the content work.
Low visit count but engagement is high
If the number of visits is low, but time spent on articles is relatively high, and if your audience engages with the website by exploring other articles, you might be onto something.
You clearly have good content. It sticks. The opportunity might lay with improving marketing channels.
High visit count but engagement is low
You cracked the distribution channels, but your content does not stick. You can explore pivoting to different content or improving the quality by doubling down on the current theme.
You clearly know how to attract attention.
High visit count and high engagement
Bingo! You've got it. Now it is time to monetize and make sure you get rewarded for the effort and hard work. Your blog works.
You are doing all the heavy lifting, and good web analytics solutions assist you in your effort, making sure you make informed decisions.
Demonstrating Value to Advertisers
Your blog can monetize in various ways. The most popular of which will be affiliate links and advertising.
Usage of web analytics in content of affiliate links boils down to detecting fraud. A more direct and tangible benefit of web analytics solution is related to advertising.
We wrote a whole article about attracting quality advertisers. Go check it out for more in-depth discussion on this subject. The TL;DR is, that there are three main classes of ads you can run.
- Syndicated, third-party ads,
- Advertorials on a blog, and
- Original, commissioned content.
For the advertising to be sustainable and not deter your readers, it must be subtle and of the highest quality. You really want to attract fewer, high ticket ads.
You will achieve this only if you can demonstrate to potential advertisers that your website enjoys the right traffic and that it has an engaged audience.
Getting orders for original content gives you revenue, SEO friendly content with a degree of control over quality to keep your blog profitable sustainably.
How do you provide that evidence to your advertisers?
- Share a screenshot of your dashboard
- Invite high-ticket advertiser with a read-only access
- Go fully open
You will often find bloggers sharing multiple Google Analytics screenshots. It is an established practice. But we can do better. Wide Angle Analytics gives you beautiful dashboards that you can capture with your screenshot tool and share with prospective advertisers. Everything is there, laid out in an approachable and colourful way.
If your advertising partners want to have more control over the views, you can invite them to your organization in Wide Angle Analytics. They can explore your dashboards at their pace. With our Business Plan, you get fine-grained controls, andyou can control which users have access to which site.
And lastly, you can adopt a fully open approach, by making web analytics dashboards for your sites publicly accessible. Our public Live Demo is an example of such open reporting. Just share a link on your partners page and everyone can get the information they need.
Summary
We went through the two most significant ways in which good, accessible and easy to read web analytics can support you in building a profitable blogging career.
Our web analytics platform, Wide Angle Analytics, can help accomplish your goals by helping you in identifying the distribution channels and engaged audience and help attract quality advertisers.