Why You Should Keep Looking at Your Stats

Many Medium writers will advise you not to focus on your statistics, but I beg to differ.

There are many articles I’ve read here on Medium where writers tell you not to look at your stats on a regular basis. They say that focusing on your stats isn’t going to make a difference in the number of views, reads, or fans you get, and instead, you should just focus on creating more content. I get it and it seems to make sense, but I beg to differ.

Obviously just looking at them to see how much they have changed over the last few hours isn’t going to be very productive. Obsessing over your stats or allowing them to make you feel good or bad about yourself isn’t helpful or healthy, but if you look at them with the intention of analyzing them and using them to better your writing, then that’s going to make a difference.

Views, reads, fans, and read ratio are the basic stats you can see on your page. Each one has value if you know how what you’re looking for.

Views

The number of views you get is usually a good way of knowing how interesting your story sounds and how well-written your headings are. The first and pretty much only thing people see when deciding to click on your story is the title and the subtitle.

The picture does matter as well to some extent, but the biggest thing about pictures is that you have a good one that relates to the content.

You can have the best picture in the world but if you have a bad title then you probably won’t get many views.

You can write the best story on the planet, but if your title isn’t appealing, people probably won’t click on it, which means less views.

Some basic things to look for in your headings:

· Are there spelling and grammar mistakes?

· Is the title too long or too short?

· Are you giving away the entire article in your subtitle?

· Is your title clickbait?

If you feel that your headings pass the basics and are well written, then you should consider the topics you are writing about. What do your followers want to read? Are you writing about things that everyone else is writing about or do you have unique content?

If you aren’t sure what topics your followers want to read, once you get enough views on a particular story Medium will actually show you a chart of what topics your readers are interested in.

Until then switch it up a bit and try to write about a few different topics. See which ones get the most views and you’ll start to learn what your readers are interested in just by looking at your views.

Reads

Just because someone clicks on your story doesn’t mean that they actually read it. This can be heartbreaking for a writer as you put so much time, effort, and heart into a story, only to have no one read it.

There can be some simple reasons why no one is reading your stories. Some are fairly easy to fix and others might take some real time and effort.

Spelling and Grammar

Is your story filled with spelling and grammar mistakes? Just like a reader will be turned off by a poorly written title, they will also be turned off by a poorly written story.

Always proofread your story before publishing it. Don’t be afraid to read it two or three times. Another great piece of advice is to read it out loud. You tend to catch more simple mistakes or weirdly worded sentences that way.

Use spell check and take into consideration the suggestions your computer gives you if you write on a program such as MS Word or Google Docs. Also, I hear lots of good things about Grammarly.

Poor Formatting

Does your story just look like one big paragraph? People don’t want to read a paragraph that never ends.

Medium provides tons of tools to help you format your articles easily.

From two different types of headings to adding quotes and dividers, it’s easy to make an article that stands out.

To be honest, many readers (including myself I confess) sometimes just skim an article and will stop at something interesting. Proper formatting can help to capture their attention and make them stop for a moment. Make sure to make your most interesting or important points stand out.

For example: If you are writing an article titled, “How I Got 100 followers in 1 Month”, your reader might just quickly skim to find out how you did it. Your job is to make sure your main points stand out and are interesting enough to make your reader want to read more about it.

Poor Content

You can have an awesome title and get views but if the content of your story just isn’t that good, people aren’t actually going to read it. They might skim it but the goal, if you want to make money on Medium, is read time which means you need to keep people on your story and you do that by making sure they read what you write.

One of the best ways to become a better writer is by reading. Yep, you heard me. Read more.

Read more articles on Medium. Read more books. Read different genres of writing by multiple authors. This will help you to learn techniques that work and some that don’t work. It will help you to formulate good sentences that flow and sentences that get your point across.

Plus reading is pretty much free. Of course, you can sign up for a medium subscription to read more stories through my link here (shameless plug) or buy books from a book store, but you can also read books on kindle or from your library for free.

Another great way to learn to be a better writer is to take writing classes. You’ll learn so much about how to structure a story or article, how to write things that people want to read, and how to capture your audience’s attention.

One secret I’ll share is that if you don’t capture their attention within in the first few sentences or paragraphs (depending on the length of your piece) you’ve pretty much lost your reader.

Read Ratio

This is a valuable tool because instead of having to sit there and do the math on each piece to see how many of your viewers actually read your story, you can just quickly look and it’s done for you. You can even sort your articles by highest or lowest read ratio.

I particularly love this tool because I love writing and I hate math. I even went to school for English partly because I would have minimal math classes lol.

This is helpful because it lets you know which stories are the most engaging. It lets you know what stories your readers are actually reading.

These stories are probably well written, interesting and on topics that your followers want to read.

It can also be helpful because it can show you how you need to grow. You can see which stories have a really low read ratio and analyze them to see why that could be. Look for trends between your stories that have lower read ratios. See if you find any patterns.

Be cautious when using this statistic if you don’t have many views on a piece. If you only have 1 view and that person didn’t read it well then it’s gonna seem like your piece is horrible with a 0% read ratio. Or if they did read it it’s gonna seem awesome with a 100% read ratio. If you only have 2 views and 1 read then it suddenly jumps to 50%. This is not an accurate way to analyze the quality of your story.

Once you get around 50 to 100 views then you are able to really use this stat.

In my opinion, a read ration of 50% or above is a success and below 50% means it needs work. Just keep it simple.

If most of your stories have a read ratio of below 50%, then you need to figure out what’s going on and work to improve your stories.

If most of your stories have a read ratio of above 50% then keep doing what you’re doing.

If you want to get more technical, my best performing stories tend to have a read radio of 60% or higher.

Also, this stat takes time for accuracy. If you only published your story two days ago, it’s gonna be hard to tell if the stats are accurate. Maybe it was the editor who read it or someone who just likes to support your work.

On the flip side maybe people haven’t actually seen it. It usually takes at least a few days for people to have a chance to see your work. How many times does a story pop up on your feed and it was written days, weeks or months ago? And not everyone is on Medium every day. You gotta give the algorithm a bit of time sometimes.

Fans

The last stat on your statics page is fans. Fans are people who clap for your story. It doesn’t matter if they clap once or 50 times, they will show up as only 1 fan.

It’s nice that it calculates as fans versus just claps because it helps you to analyze how many different people like your story versus how many claps you get. The reason is some people will give you 50 claps every time they clap. Others only ever give 1 clap no matter how much they like the story.

So, you could have 100 claps on a story but truly only 2 fans. Another story could have 25 claps but if each person only clapped once, you’d have 25 fans. In this case the story with less claps seems to be the better story in my opinion.

The amount of claps doesn’t always equate to the quality of the story.

It would seem that the more claps the better the story, but how many times have you seen popular writers with thousands of claps on their story and then read it and think to yourself, “Really?”

People sometimes clap just to support other writers, which is great of course and I encourage you do so, but don’t feel like your story isn’t a good story because you have less claps than others. It’s more important to look at how many people, how many fans, you have verses the number of claps.

Fun Fact: Medium used to pay writers based primarily on claps, but they changed it in 2019. Read more here Improving how we calculate writer earnings | by Emma Smith | 3 min read (medium.com)

As you can see there are many benefits to looking at your stats on a regular basis.

I’d personally recommend looking once a day to keep up with trends. If you miss a few days no biggie, to be honest you probably aren’t going to have a lot of change in just a day or two, but that’s what I like to do.

On minimum take a good look at your stats once a week. See which stories are doing well and which need some improvement.

See what you can learn and use that knowledge to write better stories!