How To Read Your Stats and Referrers in Typepad

I am always striving to see what people REALLY want to know… not just what I think they want. To find out the real story, I frequent the Stats and Referrers page of my Typepad account almost every day.
From there I can see where every hit came from in the last 24 hours. This information shows the web address that referred them to my site — it could be another site (yay!), one of my sites, another Typepad site that I’ve never heard of (remember, every time you post, your listing goes on hundreds of sites that have the Display New Blog Listings set to on). But the vast majority of my hits are from a Search Engine link. Within that link is the key to what my viewers really want to know, the words they typed to get my listing on Google, MSN, Yahoo! or others.
Let’s say the Referring Address looks like this www.google.com/search. In this case, the link reads:
http://www.google.rw/search?hl=en&q=how to control feelings
If you have View -> Status Bar on in IE, and you hover over the link, you can see the link’s real address. Look at the bottom of the page and you’ll see what the person Actually typed in to get to your page. Another option: Right-click on the link , choose Copy Shortcut, and then paste it somewhere and save it.
You can now see what the google-searcher typed in: “how to control feelings“.
If you then left click on the link, you can see EXACTLY what your viewer saw on Google .
I look for:
– What showed up about my site
– How my Title and Description look, read and feel
– What rank my site is on the page (#1 in this example, woohoo!).
– the Tons of other sites about very similar subjects.
(they could be competition, which you need to know about, or they could be most informative to you)
I love this feature, but I sure wish Typepad kept my history of referrers and let me download them or something. I’ve asked both their support folks and supervisors, and they all say, ‘Maybe someday’ (do other services provide this?). Since Typepad nukes this valuable information every 24 hours, I often copy and paste the links on the entire Stats and Referrer page, 20 at a time, and paste ’em into an email message that I append to and save, over and over.
Anyway, if you want to know your people and where they are coming from (literally and figuratively), your Stats and Referrers page can give a wealth of information — try it!
p.s – I downloaded and installed Google Desktop on my PC (no charge). So now, when I see the Google search page, it also shows me that I have 1,429 documents with the words “how to control feelings” stored somewhere on my computer, in the form of emails, Word docs, text files, etc. – another very powerful tool!


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2 responses to “How To Read Your Stats and Referrers in Typepad”

  1. Craig McGinty Avatar

    Hi
    Although the Typepad stats are useful they could be a lot better.
    Two free services I have used are:
    http://www.statcounter.com/
    and
    http://das.reinvigorate.net/
    If you include the code in a Typelist for example then your whole site will be measured.
    Regards
    Craig

  2. Michael D. Pollock Avatar

    Hi Andy:
    Very helpful blog. I practically obsess over my typepad stats. Constantly peering in to check up on who’s checking me out. Like Craig, I’d like to see more depth, but it gives me a good idea where people are coming from. I see FeedBurner has a service that “captures detailed traffic stats about individual feed content items.” Haven’t tried it yet, but thinking I might.
    Keep up the great work. It seems you’re the guy to go to in the coaching community when it comes to blogs.
    Best – michael

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