How Important Is Article Analytics?

Is analytics for articles a necessity? I think it can be important, but we don’t want to blow it out of proportion. It’s nice to know how many people read your article, how many clicked the link to visit your website from the article directory, and how many publishers have used your article in their e-zines and on their websites, but the real metric to keep a handle on is how much traffic an article is generating. And I don’t just mean from the article directory itself.

Some article directories provide stats on how many people read your article, clicked your links, etc. but that information is only marginally helpful. It’s much more important to know how many publishers have used your articles. If you can then identify which publishers they are, you can usually check your inbound links to find them, then you can analyze your referrer logs to see how much traffic you are getting from those sources. That’s the best kind of article analytics. Don’t be fooled by article directories that hype up their bells and whistles.