Getting Started with Pinterest Analytics

This post is OUTDATED. In August 2014, Pinterest completely revamped and significantly improved their analytics. An overview of the new analytics is available on the Pinterest Business blog in this post: How to use Pinterest Analytics to change the way you Pin.

It's been a long time coming, but Pinterest has finally released analytics! If you have a verified domain on your Pinterest account, you can now track stats for Pins from your website.

How to Access Pinterest Analytics

1. Verify your website with Pinterest. Pinterest needs to know what site you own before they can show you the analytics! If you blog on Blogger, Wordpress.com, or Tumblr, you can find instructions for verifying your site here. If you're on self-hosted Wordpress, use Pinterest's meta tag instructions here.
2. Switch to the "New" Pinterest, if you haven't already. When you log into your Pinterest account you'll be asked if you'd like to switch to the new look. Switch over and you'll be all set to check out your analytics.

Once you're verified & switched to the new Pinterest look, you can reach your analytics page by clicking on "Analytics" in the user menu dropdown at the upper right of the page.

Pinterest Site Metrics

The first page you'll see in Pinterest analytics is the Site Metrics dashboard. There's quite a bit of data there, so let's break it down.

Setting the Date Range

By default, the site metrics show you the past 14 days worth of stats. You can change the date range by using the datepicker to the left. You can quick select 7, 14, or 30 days, or you can select your own date range from the calendar. Stats go back to your original verification date (November 1, 2012 at the earliest).

Reading the Graphs

The four graphs on the Site Metrics page all have the same format — in the box to the left, you'll see a daily average of each metric, and in the graph to the right you'll see the actual daily stats from which the averages were derived.

Pins & Pinners

This shows the count of Pins from your website and how many individual people ("Pinners") Pinned something from your site.

Repins & Repinners

This shows how many times Pins from your site have been repinned, and how many people made those repins. Keep in mind, this is not a measure of repins of your Pins — it's repins of Pins from your site.

Impressions & Reach

This metric is very different from the first two stats, and it was the most elusive, until now. Impressions & Reach show you how many people are seeing your Pins, even if they didn't click on them. As Pinterest has described this metric, it seems that it measures impressions and reach of your Pins, not just Pins from your site.

"Impressions" shows how many times your Pins showed up on the main page, in search results, or on people's boards. The "Reach" shows how many people "saw" your Pins in their feed. Whether or not they actually looked at them can't be measured, but you can at least know that your Pins were on their Pinterest page.

Clicks & Visitors

If you track Pinterest visits in Google Analytics, you already have access to this information, but it's always good to have more than one source! "Clicks" shows you how many clicks went to your site from Pinterest. "Visitors" shows the number of individual people Pinterest sent you.

Most Recent, Most Repinned, Most Clicked

These three options are fairly self-explanatory; they let you see the most recent Pins from your site, the most repinned, and the most clicked in your date range. By default these are set to a one-day range, but you can use the datepicker to set a longer date range.

While this is visually very cool, it's a little tricky to get more detailed information about each of these pins. For example, if you want to find out just how many times the "Most Repinned" were repinned, you have to go to the board they were Pinned to and find the Pin to see the repin count. I don't know why this isn't just displayed on the Pin like it used to be. Maybe Pinterest will add it back :)

Go Check Out Your Stats!

You're all set to get the most out of your Pinterest analytics. Get in there and do some digging; you'll learn a lot about what your readers love about you, and you can use that to give them even more to love!

Two Great Google Analytics Solutions for Blogs

There's more to +Google Analytics than visits and pageviews. There's so much more that it can be overwhelming, especially if you're new to it.

But, earlier this week, Google released a suite of Analytics Solutions that take you straight to the "good stuff" to help you understand the data from your blog faster than ever.

Bloggers on any platform can use these new tools — all you need is Google Analytics installed on your blog. It helps if you've used it enough to know your way around the interface, but you don't need to be an Analytics champion to put these new tools to work.

(If you've never used Google Analytics before, check out the official Getting Started Guide, then come back here when you're done.)

You can browse the full collection of Analytics Solutions in the new Gallery. There are lots of them, and they're designed for many different purposes. So, I've gone through them all to find two great, easy-to-use solutions for bloggers. Let's check them out!

Custom Report: (not provided) Analysis

If you get a lot of traffic from Google searches, you probably see (not provided) up near the top of your "Keywords" list on your Traffic Sources Overview screen in Analytics.

The (not provided) "keyword" means that your visitor was logged into Google when they made the search that brought them to you. This is a privacy measure. As a Google user, I appreciate it. But, as a blogger, it's frustrating, because it makes it harder to determine what search terms brought readers to my blog.

The (not provided) Analysis report doesn't reveal the search terms of your logged-in Googlers, but it does reveal what page those visitors landed on. This can give you a pretty good idea of what your readers were looking for when they found you.

This custom report sets itself up for you with just a few clicks. To use it, go to the solutions gallery and set the first dropdown menu to "Custom Report", then look for "(not provided) Analysis" below.

Click the "download" link under "(not provided) Analysis", and you'll go to a sign-in screen for Google Analytics. Once you've signed in, you'll be prompted to select a profile if you have more than one website tracked in your account. If you just have one, it will take you straight to that site's profile.

As soon as the report is installed, you'll see the report screen. Here you can see the top landing pages for your (not provided) searches, along with other stats like visit percentage, bounce rate, and time on site. From this information, you can make an educated guess about what all those (not provided) visitors were seeking!

To get to the report the next time you log in, click "Customization" in the banner at the top of the page and you'll see your custom reports in the left sidebar.

Advanced Segments: Engaged Traffic

Advanced segments let you focus on very specific types of traffic. I'm going to show you how to install and use the "Engaged Traffic" advanced segment so you can get a feel for what they can do for you. There are many more advanced segments in the Gallery, and you can get a complete explanation of how to use them in the Google Analytics documentation.

The "Engaged Traffic" advanced segment helps you learn more about the readers who enjoy your site the most — in analytics terms, the readers that view more than 3 pages on your blog and stay for more than 3 minutes. Using this advanced segment, you can find out where in the world they're coming from, what pages they read, what brought them to your blog, and much more. If you have AdSense associated with your Google Analytics account, you can also see how much AdSense revenue readers in this group brought you.

To add the "Engaged Traffic" segment to your blog, set the first dropdown menu in the solutions gallery to "Advanced Segment", then click the "download" link under "Engaged Traffic".

On the next screen, choose the profile to apply the segment too (if you have more than one profile), and rename the segment if you like. It defaults to "Really Engaged Traffic", which works for me!

After you've decided on the name, press the "Create" button. On the next screen, you'll see that the parameters for the advanced segment have already been filled in. The "Page Depth" of 3 means that it will show visits with 3 or more pageviews. The "Visit Duration" of 180 means that it will show visits over 3 minutes (click the image to enlarge).

Press the "Save Segment" button at the bottom of the page to add the segment to your account.

Using Your Advanced Segment

Once you've set up your advanced segment, you can apply it to any Google Analytics report by clicking "Advanced Segments" near in the top navigation and clicking the checkbox next to your advanced segment (click to enlarge the screenshot).

If I wanted to find out which pages of my blog the Really Engaged Readers liked best, I'd go to the Content > Overview report and activate the "Really Engaged Readers" segment. The top ten pages my most engaged readers visited will show up at the bottom of the page. It's interesting to compare the favorite pages of engaged visitors with the pages that are popular with the average visitor — sometimes they're just about the same, but they can be surprisingly different.

Your most engaged visitors are often your biggest fans, so use the information you gather here to plan new content that makes them smile!

Keep Experimenting!

Now that you've been introduced to Google Analytics Solutions, you're ready to experiment. Take a little time to browse through the gallery and try out a new solution. Feel free to experiment and try different solutions, even if you're just curious about what they do. You can't hurt your blog or your data by trying out different solutions, so don't hold back!

Etsy Analytics: Further Reading

Congratulations, you've reached the end of the Etsy Analytics series! Miss any of the steps along the way? Here's the complete series:

• Part One: Getting Started with Etsy Analytics
• Part Two: Using Shop Stats
• Part Three: Using Campaign Tags
• Part Four: Putting it All Together

Want to read this series offline instead? This entire series is available in free ebook format via Readlists! Read it on your Kindle, your iPad/iPod/iPhone, or e-reader.

After all that, you're ready to measure your shop traffic like an entry-level boss. But, there's a whole lot more to learn about analytics! Let me set you up with some more resources for getting the most out of Google Analytics and Etsy Shop Stats.

Google Analytics

• You can't go wrong learning from the source. Check out Google Analytics' deep knowledge base for answers to your analytics questions.
• If your top incoming keyword is "Not Provided", check out How To Steal Some 'Not Provided' Data Back From Google, from Econsultancy.com. This is a tutorial that shows you how to set up a filter to change how "not provided" visits show up in your analytics dashboard.
• Etsy Success: Web Analytics Tips from the Etsy blog. Solid analytics tips, specific for Etsy shops.

Etsy Shop Stats

• Etsy Shop Stats at Handmadeology. A quick rundown on how to use Shop Stats for Etsy strategizing.
• Shop Stats Beta Team Any Etsy seller can join this group to preview new Shop Stats features and provide feedback on them before they go "live".

Analytics in General

If all this data-gathering and stats talk made you realize you're intrigued by analytics in general, do check out:

• Avinash Kaushik's blog. This blog helps you hone your analytics though process. Start with the Beginner's Guide to Web Data Analysis, and then read...well, everything else on the blog. The author also has a very pleasant twitter presence; he tweets about analytics, but also frequently posts through-provoking and entertaining links on other subjects.
• Justin Cutroni's blog. This guy is an analytics wizard. If you want to dig deeply into using and understanding Google Analytics, this dude is your guide.

Etsy Analytics: Putting it All Together

If you've been following along with this tutorial series, you've added Google Analytics to your Etsy account, taken a tour of Etsy Shop Stats, and set up campaign tags for your social media and advertising links. Nice job! You've laid the foundation for some serious data crunching!

Today we're going to talk about using your Google Analytics and Shop Stats data together to get a clear picture of what is (and isn't) bringing customers to your Etsy shop, and what your customers do when they get there.

First, one quick, important thing about using Google Analytics and Etsy Shop Stats together:

Don't Get Hung Up on Pageviews

Your pageview and visitor counts will be different in Shop Stats and Google Analytics. This is not a sign that anything's wrong; the two services measure visits in different ways.

They also handle your visits to your own shop differently. Etsy's Shop Stats automatically filters out your logged-in visits to your shop. If you visit your shop when you're not logged in, Shop Stats will record your visit.

Google Analytics will record all of your visits, logged in or not. You can filter yourself out by IP address if you have a static IP address, however if you have a dynamic IP address, IP filtering won't work.

These discrepancies alone aren't the only reason to relax about pageviews. Pageviews are not quite as important to a shop as they are to a blog or website that relies on pageviews to sell advertising. What matters in your shop is not how many people visit, but how many buy. When you're developing your promotional strategies, you need to make sure you're focusing on bringing in shoppers, not just visitors. That's where analytics can help!

What Shop Stats Can Show You

Visitor Reactions

Shop Stats gives you a personal, almost emotional, view of how your visitors interact with your shop. It literally shows you their "hearts"!

Shop Stats tells you which of your items get favorited or added to treasuries, which can help you identify which of your products to promote more heavily. Patterns in favoriting or treasury-ing can also give you an idea of which of your photos are your best.

Study your most popular products and compare them critically with your least popular — you may discover things you can change to boost the attractiveness of your more neglected products by comparing them with your most popular.

Sales Data

Only Shop Stats can tell you exactly what has sold in your shop; Google Analytics can't access this information. This information alone is useful, since it can help you identify your best sales seasons and give you a general idea of what shop promotions increase sales. When it's used in concert with data from Google Analytics, though, it becomes priceless. You can match sales data with your Google Analytics traffic to determine with certainty which campaigns, links, and promotions brought in the most sales.

What Google Analytics Can Show You

Repeat Visits

Often, your customers won't buy on their first visit to a shop. In Google Analytics, you can find out how many of your visitors have been to your shop before, and if you're using campaign tags, you can find out which campaign sent them, even after their first visit.

To view your repeat visitors, go to Audience > Behavior > New vs Returning. You'll see a summary of your total visits broken down into new visitors and returning visitors.

To see which of your visitors came in through one of your promotional campaigns, use the "Secondary Dimension" dropdown menu to select Traffic Sources > Campaign.

The page will refresh with an updated breakdown, showing you new visitors, returning visitors that came from non-campaign sources, as well as new and returning visitors referred by your individual campaigns.

This information is useful because it helps you measure the long-range value of social media links and advertising. It can be discouraging to tweet your heart out about your shop, then feel like you tweeted in vain when you don't get any sales that day. If you've campaign tagged your tweets, and match that info up with your Shop Stats, you may realize that a tweet from weeks ago caught the attention of a customer who came back today to buy!

Visitor Regions

When you sell online, it's important to know where in the world your visitors come from. For this example, let's say you ship all over North America, but don't ship outside of the continent.

Using Google Analytics and campaign tagging, you may discover that some of your campaigns are receiving a lot of attention in Europe. With this information, you might decide to expand your shipping area, which could be a great opportunity to increase sales! If it's not possible to add new delivery regions, this info can help you make changes to to your promotional campaign to ensure that you're reaching an audience within your shipping area. This might mean adjusting your tweeting schedule to better suit the right time zone. Or, you may realize that you need to advertise on different blogs if the blogs you advertise on now are skewing outside of your shipping area.

Stats for More Shop Pages

Shop Stats lumps all of your non-product pages into a general category of "Your Shop". Google Analytics can show you how many of your visitors looked at your shop's feedback, your circles, your favorites, your shop policies, etc.

This is good to know because you may discover that your shoppers are missing out on important information by skipping the shop policies page or your profile page. With this data, you can go from saying "It seems like nobody ever reads my policy page!" to "I know nobody ever reads my policy page, so I'm going to put this important info in my shop announcement/convo confirmations/product descriptions". This might help you head off customer service convos before they happen, and make it easier to close sales!

The Next Step

You've learned a lot about using the analytics tools available for your Etsy shop! Next, let me put a big long reading list in your hands to help you put the information you'll gather to good work.

Read Part Five: Further Reading

Want to read this series offline instead? This entire series is available in free ebook format via Readlists! Read it on your Kindle, your iPad/iPod/iPhone, or e-reader.

Etsy Analytics: Using Campaign Tags

So, you've set up Google Analytics for your Etsy store, toured Etsy's Shop Stats, and had a few days to look around at all the features. By now you're probably wondering how we're going to use all these tools to increase your Etsy sales! Today we're going to talk about using campaign tags to track the value of your social media links and online advertising. Identifying the best campaigns will not only save you time (and advertising cash!), it will help you concentrate your promotional efforts on the audiences most likely to buy.

What Are Campaign Tags?

You've probably seen campaign tags in action before. Ever click on a link in an email from your favorite shop and see a bunch of extra letters in the address bar? Like this:

http://www.codeitpretty.com/?utm_source=twitter&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=spring

Everything after the codeitpretty.com in that link is a campaign tag component. Campaign tags make it easy to determine which of your links brought the most shoppers to your Etsy store.

When Should I Use Campaign Tags?

Campaign tags are handy any time you want to track the response to a link or group of related links. Let's use a hypothetical shop campaign as an example. Pretend you sell organic cloth diapers, and you want to promote a 15% off special on all your bamboo diapers through the month of July. We'll call that your july_special campaign. You're going to promote that special on your blog, on Twitter, on Facebook, in your email newsletter, and on a banner ad on another blog.

Phew! That's a lot of links.

Use campaign tags and you can track response to those links at a glance in Google Analytics.

Preparing Campaign Links

Google makes it super easy to create campaign links. Just go to the URL Builder and fill in the blanks. Exactly what to put in those blanks takes a little planning, and we'll do that now!

Let's build the first link for your july_special campaign. Let's say that you've planned four separate promotional posts for your blog during the month of the sale, with each post highlighting a diaper in one of four different colors. Here's how you'd set up a campaign link promoting your baby blue diapers:

There are 5 campaign fields you can fill in, but only 3 are required (source, medium, and name). We've filled out this form with my_blog as the Campaign Source (since you'll be using this link on your own blog), blog as the Campaign Medium, baby_blues as the Campaign Content since the link promotes baby blue diapers, and july_special as the Campaign Name. We've skipped Campaign Term because it's designed for use with keyword advertising, and doesn't apply here.

To make more links from your blog, just change the Campaign Content field to reflect the content of each of your promotional posts, for example, pink_diapers, yellow_diapers, green_diapers.

You'll use the same campaign name for each of your promotional channels to keep the campaign organized, but the source, medium, and content will change based on the context of the links. For another example, let's set up the link for your paid banner ad on another blog:

This time we've changed a few things: the link goes to the bamboo diaper section in your Etsy shop, instead of a specific diaper. We've changed the source to "paid_blog_name" (in real life, use the blog's real name!). We've changed medium to "banner", since it's a banner ad. We've changed content to "bamboo_overview" since the ad shows an overview of your bamboo diaper section. The campaign name stays the same since it's still part of your july_special campaign.

By the way, you don't need to set up campaign links for your Adwords advertisements when you use Adwords' auto-tagging feature, which Google strongly recommends for Adwords.

Using this pattern, you can create tagged links for all of your promotional channels so you can determine which gets the biggest response.

A Quick Note on Using Campaign Tags on Pinterest (Updated 7/16/12)

Pinterest has recently started removing campaign tags from Pins, so campaign tags no longer work for Pinterest. Bummer, I know!

The use of most campaign links is self-explanatory; you just create the link and use it in your post, tweet, or ad. But with Pinterest, you have to create the campaign URL, visit that URL, and then create a pin from that URL. An extra step, yes, but it's worth it!

Tracking Link Response

The day after your first campaign links have run, go to Traffic Sources > Sources > Campaigns. You'll see a summary of your campaigns and the visits they brought to your store.

Even if you've never set up a campaign before, you'll find some campaigns listed in here already. Don't worry, that's normal! Unknown campaigns will appear in the analytics for any Etsy shop. Google Analytics will report every campaign tag that lead to a visit to your store, including campaigns run by Etsy.

Campaign tagging helps you track your customers' response to the campaign in general, and their response to individual links and ads in specific. Here's how:

Campaign in general: When you land on the campaigns page, you'll see a list of your campaigns and a breakdown of the visits they sent. In the diaper shop example, you'd see july_special listed as a campaign.

Links in specific: Click on the campaign name and you'll see the visits broken down further by Source/Medium. Using our diaper shop example, you'd see my_blog, paid_blog_name, and the names you gave to social media channels and your email newsletter. At a glance, you can quickly determine which links in your campaign brought the most traffic to your shop.

The Next Step

Ready to move on? Read Etsy Analytics: Putting it All Together.

Want to read this series offline instead? This entire series is available in free ebook format via Readlists! Read it on your Kindle, your iPad/iPod/iPhone, or e-reader.

Etsy Analytics: Using Shop Stats

This is Part Two in my Etsy Analytics series. Need to get caught up? Check out Part One.

Now that you've installed Google Analytics for your Etsy shop, we're going to talk about Etsy's built-in Shop Stats. You won't need to install anything to use Shop Stats; Etsy automatically collects stats for you. Today we'll take a tour through the stats interface to familiarize you with all its features.

Let's go take a look at your Shop Stats!

Getting Started with Shop Stats

To visit your shop's stats, go to Your Shop > Shop Stats. That will take you to your Shop Stats dashboard, where you can view all the data Etsy has gathered for you.

On the Shop Stats page you'll find a tabbed graph. As a default the graph shows you page views by date, with general shop views separated from individual item views. The other tabs will show you favorites, orders, and total revenue over the date range you select. You can set the date range to specific dates or use one of the many date options from the dropdown menu.

These Etsy shop screenshots come from a very generous client of mine who is just getting started with Etsy. She's a little shy about her newbie stats so I've blurred out or removed some identifying info at her request.

Scroll down a little to see even more detail about your Etsy shop!

The "Traffic Sources" column on the left will give you a general idea of where your visitors came from. You can't see specific details about linking sites, though. For example, if a blog post sent you some shoppers, you'll see the blog's domain name (example.com), but not the link to the exact post that mentioned your shop. That's info you can find in Google Analytics -- we'll get into how to do that later in this series.

Moving down below the traffic sources you'll find the keywords section. You can see the search terms your visitors used in Etsy, Google, and other search engines to find your shop or your items. If you click on each keyword, you'll see which page(s) your visitors landed on with each search term.

This access to Etsy search terms is very, very valuable. Often, internal Etsy searches drive more traffic to your shop than any other source, so it's very important to know what search terms customers used to reach your shop. Use this data to determine if you've selected appropriate tags for your products.

Below the keywords section, you'll find "Pages Viewed" and "Listing Favorites". "Pages Viewed" shows you how many times your listings and sections have been viewed. Other pages in your shop, like the main page or your policies page, are counted all together as "Your Shop"; they are not listed individually.

"Listing Favorites" are the items in your shop that have been favorited by Etsy shoppers. This little slice of warm fuzzy data will not only boost your mood, it can help you get a feel for which of your items might sell soon! For example, if you start to see a bunch of favorites on your Halloween bibs in September, you might want to make a few more!

Finding Views from Treasuries

You can find out which treasuries have sent visitors to your store in the past 30 days from the Shop Stats interface.

Under "Traffic Sources", click "Treasury" (you may need to page through the traffic sources to find it). On the resulting page, scroll to the bottom to see the items that were viewed from a treasury. Click the link for each item to view more detail. At the bottom of that page you'll see any treasury the item has been in over the past 30 days.

Etsy Stats vs. Google Analytics

Some of the information you'll get from Google Analytics and Etsy Shop Stats will overlap, of course. But each has its unique strengths, and they complement each other beautifully. To get the best available data about your shop, you really need to use both.

Here's the main thing Etsy Shop Stats has that Google Analytics doesn't: inside information about how your visitors are interacting with your items. Through Shop Stats, you can view actual sales data, which you can't track in analytics. You can also see how many people have favorited items in your shop, and any treasuries that include your items. This is a direct "finger on the pulse" of the Etsy community, and a valuable tool for determining which of your items are getting serious attention.

Google Analytics is much more customizable tool, and it will give you a different perspective on your visitors and the parts of your shop that are attracting customers. We'll cover that in more details in upcoming posts.

Take a Break!

Ok, that's been a lot to cover in two days, hasn't it? Take a little break, let some data gather, and then move on to the next post, where we'll talk about measuring the traffic generated by social media, blog posts, and advertising.

Ready to move on? Read Part Three: Using Campaign Tags

Want to read this series offline instead? This entire series is available in free ebook format via Readlists! Read it on your Kindle, your iPad/iPod/iPhone, or e-reader.

How to Make Big Blog Changes in Small Steps

There comes a time in online life when you realize you have to make a massive, time-consuming change. The kind no plugin or template change can automate. Maybe you've made a change to your blog post format, and you want to make your archive match your new posts. Or, you need to add a new color chart to each of the items in your Etsy shop. Whatever the reason, you've got a big task on your hands. Figuring out where to begin, and the next steps to take once you've started, can be a complex task all on its own. So let me help!

Today, I'm going to give you a step-by-step plan of action for organizing a big change to your online presence, combining technical tools and traditional task-tackling methods.

First: Fix the Future Before You Fix the Past

(Feel free to use as the title of your next self help book. I'll just take a 10% commission.)

This may seem like an obvious step. But, sometimes a big change can be so daunting that you end up avoiding it, permanently. If you've been putting off an important change because fixing your old posts is going to be such a chore, take this step first: make a promise to yourself that you'll add your new feature to all your future posts. That way, at the very least, every new post will be a step forward. They won't land on the "someday when I have time" pile, which will just keep growing if you keep putting it off.

Not so hard, right? Step one, done!

Next: Find Where Changes are Needed Most

After you've put processes in place to fix the future, let's move on to the past.

I'm going to cover three different ways to find where to make your first changes. Your initial instinct might be to work through your archive from your latest posts to the very first in reverse-chronological order. That's certainly one way to do it, but with a little bit of research you can prioritize your changes for the best immediate results.

Using Your Site Analytics

Ready to find the most important posts to fix first? Use your site's analytics to find your top 20 posts from the last six months.

Many blogging and e-commerce platforms have built-in analytics that give you information on your most popular content. For this example, I'm going to show you how to find it in Google Analytics, since anyone can use it, and it works the same on any website.

First, go to the "Standard Reporting" tab and set your date range to show the past 6 months. Then, go to Content > Site Content > Pages.

When you've reached the Pages list, set the Primary Dimension to Page Title.

You'll now see your top ten pages. You can page through to see your top 20, or change the "show rows" dropdown menu at the bottom of the page to see more results on the page.

Using Google's Webmaster Tools

With Webmaster Tools you can find your most-linked content. Often there is overlap with your most viewed content, but you'd be surprised by how much these two sets of pages can differ, so it's worth a look! You can also use Webmaster Tools info in place of analytics data if for some reason you don't have analytics set up on your site.

After you sign up for Webmaster Tools and verify your site, Google will begin to gather information for you. It can take a few days for the data to appear, so be patient! Once the data is available, go to "Traffic" > "Links to your site" and click the "More" link beneath "Your most linked content". This will take you to a listing of the top 25 most-linked pages on your site. Number one is probably your home page, but the rest are usually posts.

Using the Calendar

This is a very low-tech way to find the next posts to fix, and you may not even need the calendar if you happen to know what season it is. (If you don't, go to whatseasonisit.com. Or go outside.)

If you have seasonal content, fix the posts that apply to the current and upcoming seasons next. For example, if you know your vegan barbecue recipes get a lot of attention in the summer, fix those posts in the spring so they're ready for the next big wave of visitors.

Finally: Finishing the Job

Once you've freshened up your most important and popular posts and fixed up your content for the upcoming season, you may still have a lot of tidying up to do. If you break it up into manageable chunks, you'll be finished in no time!

Prioritizing the Rest

You can use the same methods you used to find your highest priority content to continue working through your posts. You can choose to go through posts in order of popularity based on your analytics. Or, if your content is heavily seasonal, it may make more sense to continue working through the seasonal cycles. If neither of those ideas really apply to your site, you can start from your latest post and work your way back through your archives. That way, visitors who page through your site chronologically have a consistent experience, at least on the first batch of pages they see.

Scheduling Changes

Scheduling is such a personal thing, but I do have a few suggestions for how to squeeze changes into your regular blogging schedule.

Schedule a "fix day". Maybe once or twice a week, maybe once or twice a month, but somewhere on your calendar, give yourself a day when you'll dedicate your blogging time to fixing your old posts. This is an especially good way to take on high-priority changes, like SEO improvements or error corrections. If you make an appointment to do it, you're less likely to forget it or blow it off.

Use your "idle" blogging time. You know that time you spend refreshing the page, waiting for a reply to your wittiest tweet at your favorite mega-blogger? Or that time you spend staring at Real Time Analytics, thinking, "I should probably be doing something useful right now..."? While you linger, open up your blog in a new tab and start fixing old posts. You can probably knock out two or three between the time you tweet and the time you get retweeted ;)

Bringing in Help

If you have a truly gigantic task ahead of you and you don't know when you'll find the time to make the changes, odds are good that it's because you have a long-running, popular blog. And a popular blog usually has an active and devoted following. If you can't realistically balance making your changes with your blogging schedule, ask your community for help! Blog tune-ups like this are perfect tasks for interns or freelancers. You'll need to be careful about who you trust, of course, but you don't need me to tell you that ;)

Do you have a big blog renovation project on the horizon? Got any task-tackling tips to share? Let me know in the comments!

Fonts in the title card: Raleway, Fredericka the Great, and Emily One from the Google Web Fonts library