How to measure your online success

By April L. Hamilton

So, you’ve got your author website up, you’re blogging regularly, and maybe you’re even doing some guest blogging on others’ sites. But how do you know if it’s working?

First, you need to define what “working” means. You may be thinking book sales is the only measure that really matters, and while increasing your sales is one of the long-term goals, in the beginning it’s mostly about building traffic and exposure. After all, if you only have a handful of regular visitors, even if every one of them buys your book you still haven’t sold a lot of books. And if you’re trying to catch the eye of an agent or publisher, getting the word out all over the web about you and your wonderful writing is critical.

Here are metrics to watch and tools to help monitor and interpret them:
Traffic Statistics: Your site may have a statistics function built in, or you may have to add it yourself. The built-in type can be accessed via your site’s control panel; if you don’t administer your own site, you’ll need to ask the person who does to periodically report on your site statistics. If you need to add statistics functionality, you can use Google Analytics or StatCounter for free. They both work essentially the same way: You open an account, you’re given a snippet of HTML code to paste into the pages you want to track (it’s invisible to site visitors), and you return to the statistics provider site whenever you want to check your statistics. Here are some of the most important stats to watch:

Hit Count: Each element on a web page (i.e., graphics, banner, sidebar widgets) can register a “hit” whenever the page is loaded, so overall hit count isn’t as important as the count of “Unique Visitors,” which measures actual visits from separate individuals.

Popular Pages /Entry Pages /Exit Pages: Popular pages shows you which pages (or blog entries) are getting the most visits. Knowing this can help you to better tailor your content to your site visitors.

Entry pages tells you which pages are most frequently the first to be visited when someone arrives at your site. This is important because your home page may not be the most popular point of entry to your site. If so, you don’t want to display your most important information (i.e., anything time-sensitive) on your home page exclusively, and you may want to dress up the home page a bit with whatever the listed entry pages have that’s lacking on the home page.

Exit pages lists the last page visitors saw before exiting your site. While you can’t know for certain why a visitor chose to exit your site when he did, you can often make educated guesses that aren’t too wide of the mark. For example, visitors who exit from your ‘favorite links’ page are probably following a link. Visitors who exit from your ‘where to buy my books’ page are probably following your ‘where to buy’ links. Following the link doesn’t guarantee a book sale, but it means the visitor was at least interested enough to consider buying.

Came From: This one tells you what sites your visitors came from, and it’s one of the most useful of all your statistics. It tells you which other sites are linking to your site, and you can visit those sites to learn the context of the link to your site: was it a recommendation, or a complaint?

If it’s the former, it’s a good idea to write to the site owner or use the site’s comment form to offer thanks for the mention. You may end up exchanging links or guest blogging for one another, but even if you don’t, widening your circle of like-minded peers never hurts.

If it’s the latter, the best course of action depends on the specifics. If it’s a simple misunderstanding, consider making some effort to clear it up via email or on the other site’s comment form. If it’s a rant from someone who obviously enjoys ranting more than engaging in genuine communication, it’s probably best to ignore the site because you can’t reason with an unreasonable person. If the complaint is valid, you may want to consider printing a correction or update and contacting the other site owner to notify her of your actions.

Came from can also tell you how many people are finding your site via search engines, social media like Twitter, and direct links in email messages. Social media and email links are a very good sign, since they signify that your visitors like your site enough to share it with others. The search engine stats show you what search terms resulted in a link to your site. This is helpful information to have for tailoring your content, ‘keywords’, ‘tags’, and if you’re authoring your own web pages, your metadata. For example, if the keywords you use most often aren’t showing up in search engine ‘came from’ links, you need to change them.

Finally, came from is a great measure of how well your online promotional efforts on sites other than your own site or blog are working. If you’ve guest blogged, hopefully you’ll see some incoming traffic from that post. Similarly, if you’ve posted a book trailer on YouTube, you’ll want to watch for incoming traffic from that site. This type of data can help you focus your online promotional efforts where they’re most effective.

Online Chatter: Site statistics won’t tell you the whole story about how your site is being perceived by the outside world. When someone posts a link to your site using a URL shortener, like Snurl, that link may not show up in your statistics. Also, it’s good to know when someone online is talking about your site even when they’re not linking to it.

An excellent tool for this kind of intelligence-gathering is Who’s Talkin, a special search engine that only searches blogs, social media, news sites, and even online discussion forums. You can enter your name, your site/blog name, your site URL, book title, or anything else you like to see where, when, and in what context people on those types of sites are mentioning the search term(s).

Also, don’t neglect those old standbys: Do periodic searches on your site/blog name, your name, and your book title on Google and any social media sites you use (i.e., Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, etc.).

Keeping on top of your site statistics and online references is a job that never ends—at least, not until you stop caring about building traffic and exposure. Luckily, it need not take more than 10-15 minutes each day or about an hour each week, so don’t neglect it. Knowledge is power, and in this case, it’s the power to make your site more appealing to visitors and manage your online reputation.

Do you have another recommended method of tracking your online success? Please post it here in the comments.

April L. Hamilton is an author, blogger, Technorati BlogCritic, leading advocate and speaker for the indie author movement, and founder of Publetariat, the premier online news hub and community for indie authors and small imprints. In her popular self-published reference book, The IndieAuthor Guide, she offers aspiring self-published authors a roadmap to publishing success.

Tagged as: self-publishing