How Often Should You Check Your Blog Analytics?

Blog analytics are incredibly important.

If you don’t have yours set up, you’re losing valuable data about your audience, your top performing posts, and how many people are visiting your site.

But your analytics can actually hurt you.

Bloggers get so addicted to their analytics that they stop being productive. They spend hours every day checking stats that they cannot change – like the traffic they had 2 days ago.

That’s not to say you shouldn’t check your analytics, but you need to stop letting it hinder your progress.

I’m going to help you set firm boundaries on when/why you check your G4 and Google Search Console data. And we’ll talk about how often to check other blog-related stats.

Let’s make this year the year of productivity, not procrastination.

How Often Should You Check Your G4 Analytics

G4, the system in Google Analytics, measures the traffic you get to your site on a given day from any source.

This is where you can see the pageviews, sessions, users, and specific pages getting traffic per day.

I recommend checking your Google Analytics about once per month.

You probably just spit out your coffee.

Most bloggers check their analytics 3+ times per week.

I understand that people want to see how their traffic is trending, but it’s not beneficial to do it every day – and definitely not multiple times a day.

Here’s why:

1. Your traffic data takes 48 hours to settle in G4. So checking every day doesn’t make much sense when the last few days aren’t settled. It won’t make a difference to wait a few days. And you definitely can’t change it just by checking multiple times a day.
2. You can’t change the data. If you are not in a space where you’re actively auditing content, looking at your analytics won’t change anything. Writing new content or building backlinks will – but neither of those happens in your G4 account, do they? So get out of there and get to work.
3. Low numbers can crash your mood and productivity. We all hope to log in and see that our traffic has skyrocketed. It’s great if that does happen, but that won’t necessarily prove your productivity. What will ruin your productivity is seeing it dip – even if it’s just your slow day of the week. You can actively wreck your mindset and lose days of productivity by checking your analytics too often.

“But, Nina, I want to see how close I am to Mediavine.”

If you are at 10k pageviews a month, you’re not magically going to be at Mediavine levels within 24 hours. Even if something goes truly viral, you still won’t hit Mediavine because they want long term, sustainable growth.

So chill out and check your analytics 1x per week to 1x per month.

If you’re at 46k sessions, sure you can check more often but it’s still not going to help as much as taking action with something like a Scavenger Hunt plugin or publishing a zero volume keyword post.

The only exception is when you’re doing a content audit and are analyzing the analytics. That is when the data is actually actionable.

How Often Should You Check Your Google Search Console Data / Rankings

Bloggers are obsessed with rank tracking.

You do not need to check your rankings for every keyword every day. In fact, it’ll hurt you.

New posts take about 6 months to settle in the rankings. Existing posts will be influx if there’s been a recent Google update (when isn’t there an update, really). And looking at lowered positions is just going to put you in a bad mood where it’ll be harder to create content.

Here’s the truth: I don’t track my keyword rankings.

I only look at my rankings when I’m doing a content audit, or redoing my spreadsheet of which posts need me to build backlinks.

I log into Google Search Console to index new posts (I know they do it on their own, but I’m a control freak) or to do a content audit.

That’s it.

Google Search Console is only beneficial when you are going to use it to take action; whether that’s finding zero volume keywords to target, finding posts that need updates or no indexing, or finding keywords that need backlinks to rank.

I check Google Search Console rankings maximum 1x per month, if that. And that’s usually for screenshots for something I’m posting about for y’all.

Save yourself the time clicking through pages trying to see if you’re finally ranking #1 for that keyword you wrote on 2 weeks ago. Spend that time writing better content and building backlinks.

How Often Should You Check Your Ad Network Data

I do recommend logging into your ad network daily to add the income to your income tracker spreadsheet – if you’re not tracking your income, you should be.

BUT I do not recommend analyzing the data every day.

It doesn’t benefit you to see how much money each post on your site made each day.

I only look at this data when I’m troubleshooting my ads (you can spot a problem, like that the code got deleted, by seeing the income crash for a day. A good network will email you though) or when I’m trying to replicate my top performing posts.

How Often Should You Check Your Affiliate Income

Check your affiliate income daily for your income spreadsheet for evergreen payments.

I use Affilimate to syndicate my affiliate earnings across a variety of networks so I can grab this data quickly.

Beginners can use TravelPayouts to do the same in the travel niche.

But I’ll also log into the affiliates that aren’t a part of those networks to check their earnings.

However, if something is timely, like a bundle that only runs for a week, I’m not checking that every day of the year.

I only check relevant affiliates that I am actively promoting.

This isn’t a time suck because it’s encouraging my money mindset. Even if you have $0 days – we’ve all been there! – it helps you notice those days that you do make money. The days you don’t, you can strategize to produce more content around those affiliates.

Just like with my ad network, I don’t analyze my posts or analytics in detail. I’m just grabbing the total dollar amount to add to my income tracker.

I will check the data in more detail when I’m auditing my content, creating a new affiliate plan or affiliate keyword strategy, or if I’m analyzing how a past promo performed.

How Often Should You Track Your Social Followers

It can be really addictive to see how your social following ticks up – or even how many likes/views you have on a piece of content.

But it doesn’t actually matter.

Just like your Google Analytics, you cannot control how many likes/views a piece of content will get after you post/promote it.

I only look at my social followers when I set a random goal to hit – which I usually do cause I happened to notice I’m near an even number and I like even numbers – or when I’ve taken action to get more followers and I want to see how it paid off.

Essentially, that’s 1-2x a month.

Do not let checking this data slow you down from producing great content.

It’s ok to notice it when you log into your account, but it’s not worth staring at the number hoping it’ll magically tick up. That’s not productive.

Now, if you’re doing an audit of your content (which I hear is a thing you should do) to figure out what performs best, etc. then, yes, look at your analytics and your followers. But sitting there refreshing the page over and over to see it tick up by 1 or 2 a day – or more if you’re better at socials than I am – isn’t helpful.

How Often Should You Track Your Newsletter Subscribers

You may start to notice a pattern by now…

I check my newsletter subscribers when I’m updating my Newsletter Sponsors page, when I hit a limit and need to upgrade my account, or when I’m doing a cold scrub of subscribers who don’t open emails.

That’s about 1-2x every 3 months.

You’ll often notice the number when you log into your account to write an email, since it features on the homepage of Convertkit and Mailerlite in your dashboard. But I don’t really pay attention to it.

Because looking at the number won’t change it.

I prefer to look at it’s growth over periods when I’ve done something to get new subscribers – like when I spent 2 months running a case study comparing a bundle, summit, and podcast as lead generation methods.

What You Should Do Instead of Checking Stats

Data is great to analyze, but it’s not worth anything if you’re just staring at numbers.

I’ve spent my fair share of time during my first 4 years blogging thinking that those numbers meant everything and that staring at them was the best thing I could do.

But I had no success during that time.

That was partially because I had no consistent strategy until I figured out what actually worked with SEO.

And it was partially cause I wasted so much time between Facebook comment swaps and staring at figures as though I could will them to change.

I tried as hard as I could for 4 years. I promise you, no matter how hard you stare at your analytics, they will not magically increase.

Instead, spend your time on activities and strategies that move the needle.

Write new blog posts. Get backlinks from guest posts. Write affiliate posts. Go on podcasts as a guest. Create digital products or service offers. Network with people in your community.

All of those things will do far more for you than staring at G4 ever will.

Going from checking my analytics 3+ times a day to 1-2 times a month has freed up so much time. I can get an extra 2 blog posts written in that time.

Even if both those posts only get 200 views a month, that’s still 200 more views than staring at my analytics was going to get me.

Your mindset will also thank you for leaving the numbers alone. More often than not, the biggest impact they have is to bring you down. Higher numbers have a short lived dopamine hit, while low numbers will wreck you for a couple days.

Don’t punish yourself with this procrastination.

Instead, gift yourself productivity by keeping your head down and working on what actually benefits your blog.

I challenge you to skip checking your analytics this month and instead spend that time applying for guest posts. I’ve even curated a list of blogs you can pitch here.

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