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Yep, good points, Mack.

I'd say that an important metric that people often overlook (since no standard analytics tool gives it to you out oft he box) is # of unique commenters, #/% of repeat commenters (blog-wide and on specific-posts), # of comments per post, and total # of comments. This gets to the more important metric of engagement rather than simply traffic.

I'd also say that while it's important to look at referrers, looking at time-on-page, pages-per-visit, and bounce rate is also important and especially so in relation to referrers, so you can see which are actually the most valuable. Stumbleupon may send you twice as many visitors, but if Twitter sends you visitors that stay twice as long or visit three times as many pages...

I forget who said it, and I'm mangling the quote, but it goes something like statistics without analysis are just trivia. If all you're looking at are the raw numbers, what are you really getting from them?

Which gets to the much larger and some would say more important issue of knowing what metrics are important based on your site goals and objectives. If you don't know what you're measuring, how do you know what stats to look at? And how do you use them to actually improve your site? To mangle the above "quote," even further, I'd say that statistics without action-taken from them are just trivia...

Posted by: Nicholas Tolson on July 1, 2008

Came here from Plurk although I saw the link on Twitter as well. Honestly some days I land on your posts from Twitter and other days from Plurk.

Timing seems to part of it as well, my Twitter posts roll of my screen quickly. You don't have to switch to a new page to look at old posts on Plurk like you do on Twitter.

Posted by: Tanya on July 1, 2008

Nicholas, that's MY line. We used to run a seris of ads that said "Research without Insight is Just Trivia" still true today. Actually Mack, thanks for this. It reminded me to go to our Google Analytics Dashboard and see what impact various tactics are having. Since I started cross posting from Twitter to the Blog and from the Blog to Facebook we've increased traffic 32%.

Posted by: Katie Paine on July 1, 2008

@Katie - What's the saying? Always steal from the best...

I've modified my line... Statistics without actions-taken are worse than trivia - they're worthless!

Posted by: Nicholas Tolson on July 1, 2008

Guys thanks for the comments! Katie are you using something to pull your blog posts and post them to Facebook? If so, what? I was using the Blog Friends app to do this on FB for a while, but of course that app was closed.

Posted by: Mack Collier on July 1, 2008

I am just brand new, but I have started leaving comments on other blogs over the past couple of weeks and noticed that the referring sites that I am receiving are from the blogs I commented on.

Don't you think the Twitter and Plunk thingy will be a fad?

It sounds like you may have gotten more traffic from Twitter in the beginning and now the new "craze" is out and everyone is going over to the new site which is driving your traffic.

Posted by: MBL on July 4, 2008

"It sounds like you may have gotten more traffic from Twitter in the beginning and now the new "craze" is out and everyone is going over to the new site which is driving your traffic."

I checked and for the year, Twitter has sent 4.34% of my blog's traffic. So for the last month, it's almost double that. But I use Twitter more now than I did in January, in fact May was my most active month ever (based on number of tweets I left), and June was my second most active.

And no, I don't think Twitter is going anywhere. It's too early to tell on Plurk, but microblogging as a social media tool is here to stay, it seems. And since Twitter is the dominant player in this space, it's fairly well-established moving forward.

Posted by: Mack Collier on July 4, 2008

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Posted by: Trixie on July 7, 2008