Saturday, February 4, 2012

View Numbers: What do they Really Tell You?

When you look for your latest hub on your statistics page. Do you immediately look for the daily viewing figure?

I would bet money that you do. Why? Because I do just that too.

We all like to have good viewing figures. Often you will see Hubbers post a milestone of so many thousand.  Which is good. 
But what exactly do the HubPages viewing statistics actually tell you?
Not much really.

The HubPages figure will only tell you the number of people who clicked on your link to a certain hub. They may then may or probably not actually read your hub. If they don't read your hub and you are concentrating on numbers it may look like a good hub but you will only be working on a false premise if you think that the hub arose interest and you then keep working on similar material.

I suggest linking your HubPages account to Google Analytics.

Why?

It's Free.

It tells you the most viewed hubs now almost in real time.

You can see at a glance how many of those views credited by HubPages are readers. You should not be disappointed if you see only 30% of views are people who remain on your hub or website for more than 1 second.

One second! Yes you will find most people will not give you even that. The control bar may hardly have loaded before they click away to someone else. That is just the way of the internet, I'm afraid.

Then have you noticed views before you have actually published a hub?

Those are "Spiders" web robots checking you out.  Their visits also count with HubPage views, but you can easily filter them out using Google Analytics.

Here are some good books of advice on using Google Analytics:

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