Squidoo is great for putting up a quick web page that will rank more highly in Google for its keywords than a brand new website (all other factors being the same). And Squidoo lenses generally get ranked in Google search results in a couple of days.
But one of my pet peeves about Sqiudoo has been the poor stats offered.
The old stats gave you charts of the number of visitors your lens had, the lensrank of it, and how many outgoing links were clicked (but not which links). In modern terms, this was primitive! Especially when Squidoo itself uses Google Analytics, so they had the data available.
The new stats that just rolled out expose more of the Google Analytics data for your lens.
Here’s an example of one of the sections of stats for my Roleplaying With Kids lens.
You can see that it breaks out the traffic (for the last 7 days) by source, which is nice for getting an overview of where your visitors are coming from.
It’s curious to me that I have some direct traffic coming to the lens. That would be people who didn’t click on a link, but bookmarked the page or typed the link into their web browser. I wouldn’t have predicted this.
Google accounts for the majority of the traffic to the lens, which is what I would expect, since Squidoo lenses rank highly in Google results.
Also provided are lists of keywords used in search engines:
This is the most valuable section of the new stats.
Everyone talks about long-tail keywords being valuable, but predicting a good long tail keyword is difficult.
This listing shows what long-tail keywords my content is attracting that I hadn’t thought about originally.
The keywords with a little + next to them are keywords that are not targeted by my lens. Some of them may very well apply, but others may not be a good match for the lens, and point out new niches to explore.
You also get a list of sites that are in the referral section of the summary above.
This helps you to know where your traffic is coming from. If someone has linked to your lens, it’s worth exploring their site to see if there are other niches you can create a lens about, or other content to fill out your current lens.
The clickouts section (below) shows you which links leaving your lens are being clicked on (the count of clicks is also given). This helps you to know which outgoing links are most popular, and might indicate either a good candidate for expanding your information about, or breaking out into a new lens.
You can adjust the stats to get information for the last 30 days, just today, or just yesterday, as well as the default 7 day period.
There’s also a royalties section that shows details of any Amazon.com orders that were placed due to using the Squidoo Amazon.com module. My lens doesn’t have any links to Amazon.com, so I can’t show you that section.
I’m excited about the new stats, and expect to be able to improve the traffic to my lenses by using the information they provide.
If you’re not already using Squido, you can sign up here and create your first lens within minutes.