Creating a StatBook: Tutorial B2S/B2B Week 5

We’ve spent a lot of time this week talking about what data to track, what to do with it and what tools you might use.

Today’s tutorial is going to show you how to make a StatBook – an ongoing, always-updated look at the stats that are important to you.

We’re going to use my StatBook as an example. Your StatBook may look different, because you’re looking at different stats or have different goals. But you’re more than welcome to copy my format if you like. If you want my actual electronic copy to set up and use for yourself, I’m happy to e-mail it to you – just drop me a line!

1. What You’ll Need: you need the stat tools you’re using, and Excel. If you don’t have Excel, I recommend trying out Google Documents and using their spreadsheet tool.  If you don’t know how to use either, search for online tutorials on either product. They’re widely available, and you will only need to know how to use the very basics – no complicated formulas or computations are needed. {I’d love to give you an Excel tutorial but I have a life}

 2. Open Up A Workbook. First you’ll need to open up a new workbook. A workbook can contain sheets. Each sheet can track separate groups of data so that they’re organized. Name your workbook something. Mine is KMStatBook2010, so I know it’s all my stats that I’m tracking this year.

3. Decide How Many Sheets You’ll Need.  You’ll need a sheet for each group of related data that you are tracking. Remember how I talked about my Magnificent 7 in this week’s reading? Well, I have 6 sheets in my workbook – one for each of my Magnificent 7 groups (I combine pageviews and visitor data into one sheet).

4. Make a layout for your sheets.  Decide how each sheet will be titled, what data will be put in what columns, and whether you are tracking weekly, monthly or quarterly data. I like to track monthly. This is how I designed my layout for my Network sheet.:

and here’s another example of how I’ve laid out my top traffic sources data:

Now it’s easy for me to spot some trends! I see that I need to ensure that my Feedburner setup is always spot on, because it’s my top referrer. Twitter has gradually moved up in the ranks because I have been working hard on Twitter. I can see that my features at ThetaMom, LadyBloggers and ScaryMommy brought a lot of traffic to my site those months.

5. Enter your data. Once you have the layout for each sheet, you can just pull the data from whatever reporting tool you’re using and enter it into the appopriate sheet. Save as you go! Yes, Google Analytics does have an Excel import feature that you can use, but I would end up re-customizing how the data looks anyway, so I just add it in to each sheet manually.

6. Keep it updated. On the first of every month, spend 5 or 10 minutes entering the previous month’s updates. If you stay on top of it each month, it’s not that much work to do.

7. Start looking for trends.  In this week’s reading, I talked about trendspotting. I want to show you how I use my content data to drive what I do on my blog. Let’s take a look at my most trafficked posts for July and August:

Two of my most popular posts in July were My Blogging Arch-Nemesis and Unrequited Love – two posts about blogging. In August, BlogHer? I’ll Pass and Are You A Hot Blogger? were in my top 10 – again, two posts about blogging. It became obvious to me that for whatever reason, people really liked when I blogged about blogging.  As I said in Week 4: figure out what resonates with your readers and bring it. This data was the single biggest inspiration behind the B2SB2B challenge! This is how you take data and turn it into something actionable and powerful for YOU.

I hope this tutorial helps you organize your data a bit and lets you see how truly powerful it can be. Without my data, there’d be no B2S/B2B challenge, and without this challenge, my blog wouldn’t have grown by the leaps and bounds it has in the last 30 days.

Start thinking about what you can do today with your data to make your blog better for you and your readers!

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Tagged as: B2SB2B Challenge, stats, tutorial