After all, I personally believe, a user will return if (and only if) I provide value through my blog. If I want traffic, I have to provide value.

Translates to:
If I want money/profit, I have to provide quality.

Or I can also choose the easy way and flame someone so bad he rants back. Like they say, there is no bad publicity, only publicity. And I do agree to some extent.

Regards,
Shri.

In the early stage of your blog, referrals would be important. You need to analyze almost every link or page referring traffic to your site. Almost any blog saying a few nice things about you could be the difference between 4 hits or 0 hits. At this point, analyzing your AdSense earnings would be pointless.

When you start receiving 1000 unique visitors a day, it becomes a different matter. You really have to ask serious questions if your topic is not generating reasonable AdSense income or other Advertising income.

Darren Rowse at Pro Blogger asked which statistic is most crucial to your blogging? He received a lot of different answers in the comments to his post: Entry pages based on search engine resultsPage viewsReferring link – how’d they get…

I use Google Analytics which is JavaScript based. AwStats and Analog use Web Server Log Files. All there programs are free and widely used.

So much depends on what stage each blog is at. If they’re still in the early stages then you might want to nurture every grain of traffic and pay closer attention to referrers than actual traffic. Alternatively if it’s well established in its traffic patterns then AdSense CTRs or CPM might be more important as a first port of call.

Every blog is different – or else there wouldn’t be point.

So, one report with many different uses.

Or I guess you could say “Income per month” is the most important statistic actually *g*

Choosing one, I’d pick page views. It’d be great to know who’s linking to you, but if you have a decent site, links will take care of themselves.

On the other hand, if you are getting lousy page view stats, that’s a better indicator that something is wrong than a lack of referrals. That’s one of the best ways of knowing how healthy your blog is. If people are sticking around, it’s a good sign that they will come back.

If your goal is to provide content, I would ask you how many page views, how many new vs. returning visitors, your visitor loyalty, your stickiness and your bounce rate

If you are primarily an email based site like Google / Yahoo groups or perhaps some forums that send out an email at the end of the day, I would ask you about how many people open your emails and how many people read your emails

If your goal is to sell products using a shopping cart on your site, I would ask you how many people people put an item in their shopping cart, how many people people abandon the shopping cart process an how many people complete it resulting in a sale.

Now each industry will emphsaize one metric more than the other. For example, if you are an article based site, then you visitors had better spend a lot of time on your posts. That may be more important the the raw number of people that are driven to your site.

Bear in mind, you can get a lot of page views which will not translate into clicks or sales. As Darren says so often, in some industries like politics, gossip, etc, you may get a lot of page views, which quickly become useless because the traffic does not convert to AdSense Clicks or goals.

If there is a formula, my guess would be,
1.) Know your goals. Without goals you can’t measure anything

2.) Know your industry. What metric is really important? Don’t compare yourself to others, because numbers are not all the same across industries.

My 2 Cents

I think checking income is tempting but really it looks after itself – and I’d be more interested in knowing how people were getting to me.

On the other hand having some AdSense stats would be nice – not just to know the earnings, but to monitor how different channels are performing with CTR etc.

It is a hard one – but I’d probably go with referrals as that’s a stat I look at quite a bit