If you’re an “honest to goodness” blogger you have your stat pages bookmarked for easy access. You probably have a plugin or two that will help in your efforts to keep track of things as well. No doubt like me you spend ridiculous amounts of time “studying” your visitors trying to plan the perfect move that will draw more in and help retain the ones you already have. Don’t lie, we all do it. It’s part of blogging. It’s part of how we strategize. But what do we get out of it? There are really two main questions to ask ourselves.

How does it benefit our readers?

In what way does keeping tabs on our stats make our blog more enjoyable, more beneficial, more exciting for the average reader? That’s really what it comes down to is benefiting your customer. If you don’t do that why should they stick around and keep reading when there are 150,000 other blogs out there ready to tear you to shred.

Here’s your assignment: Dig into the archives of a few of the better known blogs our there (DoshDosh, Shoemoney, Problogger, and John Chow), and see if you can see how much benefit each one of them gives their readers in nearly every post.

If you don’t learn anything from this exercise you are clinically dead. Please proceed to the morgue throwing aside all haste.

How does it benefit our blog

Checking stats serves a purpose. No one will dispute that, but I defy you to prove to me that being anal about your analytics will benefit your blog. Some people say to check stats once or twice a day. I say to check them every other day at the most. There’s a reason to that, but if nothing else you’ll give yourself more exciting to look at than a .00001% increase in visitors from 3/1000th of a second ago when you checked.

Like I said there is a reason for checking stats much less often, and it is simply productivity. Nothing more, nothing less. If you took all the time you spend checking stats and compare that with how much time you spend researching, and producing content you will almost surely be in a state of shock. I certainly was after doing some calculations this past week. More than 3/4 of my time was spent checking stats! You may not be that bad, but I’m confident you need some work as much as I do!

Like I said those are two questions we should be asking ourselves in regards to how often we check our stats. I submit that for every moment spent stat chasing as opposed to producing great content costs our blogs readers. And who among us can afford to lose readers?

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Tags: analytics, blogging stats, statistics, stats