Dr. Bob Clarke writes every post on a blog that has been running since 2010, and it now has more than 400 articles. For the first few years, he didn’t look at the numbers on any of them.
He looks now, and MonsterInsights is what helps him decide what to write next.
This is part of our case study series, where I ask real MonsterInsights users to walk us through how they actually use their reports.
We’ll dive into what they check, how often, and what they change because of what they see. Bob’s answer came down to two reports and a 30-day window.
In This Article:
An Introduction to Dr. Bob Clarke
Bob and Rosemary Clarke coach people who are building a business in whatever hours their job leaves them. Their stated promise is to help online marketers grow and automate that business in the “nooks and crannies” of the day.
When I asked Bob who he teaches, he described people in the position he was once in himself:
I teach busy entrepreneurs who are trying to grow their business while working a full-time job. Many of these are professionals who are looking at retiring on their own terms.
— Dr. Bob Clarke
Retiring on their own terms is the part he shares with them. He and Rosemary started their home business in 2008, while both were still working, for that exact reason.
Their day jobs were at an infertility laboratory in New York City, where both were senior embryologists. It was a career of more than twenty years that, by their own account, had a hand in over 25,000 births.
On October 25, 2019, they cut a retirement cake and left their healthcare careers — years ahead of schedule. They were able to do this because of the business they had built on the side.
That business now sells ten courses and workshops, among them The Part-Time Profit Machine, Crush Consistency NOW!, Part-Time Mastery, and The SilverPreneur Blueprint. Bob also runs a coaching program and a private Facebook group.
The business carries both their names, at bobandrosemary.com. Bob writes the blog — every one of those 400-plus posts is his, and so is the decision about what goes up next. He answered our questions himself, so every quote here is his too.
The blog is the front of all of it: more than 400 posts, going back to 2010. For the first few years, Bob wasn’t reading the numbers any of them produced.
The Challenge of Remembering to Look, and Knowing What Matters
When I asked Bob what he finds hardest about analytics, he named two things, in this order:
Honestly, the most frustrating part of analytics is remembering to check them and then to understand which is most important.
— Dr. Bob Clarke
Neither one is fixed by having more data. He had to remember to look in the first place, and then, in his words, work out which is “most important.”
The first of those is what cost him. For years he published steadily without a read on any of it. He described the before and after in an earlier survey, in one line:
I had no idea where my traffic was coming from. Now I do.
— Dr. Bob Clarke
What changed wasn’t the amount of data available to him. It was that he started asking the reports a much narrower question — and our rundown of the Google Analytics metrics worth tracking is a good place to start on the second problem he named.
Finding the Next Post in the Last 30 Days
When I asked Bob to walk me through the routine, he gave me the first two stops in order:
First, I check the overview to get a birds-eye view of how my blog is doing. Then I head over to Traffic –> Landing Pages to see which posts are getting the most traffic.
— Dr. Bob Clarke
The Overview report is the birds-eye view he means. It puts sessions, engaged sessions and the trend line for the window he picks on one screen, so a month reads as a shape rather than a table.
That tells him how the blog is doing. It doesn’t tell him which post did it, which is why he doesn’t stop there.
Asked in an earlier survey what he valued most in MonsterInsights, Bob named those same two reports, and said why:
the feature that tells me where my traffic is coming from and my most popular posts. Because it allows me to replicate what is working best!
— Dr. Bob Clarke
The Landing Page report does the first half of the work. It ranks entry pages by traffic over whatever window you pick, which is how he finds which pages on a site are getting the most traffic — out of more than 400 of them.
Our guide to reading landing page data in GA4 covers the same report in more depth.
His third stop is the Source/Medium report, to see which platform is sending him the most traffic.
It breaks that same traffic down by where it came from, which turns “this post worked” into “this post worked, and here is the channel that carried it.”
Read together, the two reports produce a decision, and he states it plainly:
That makes my next move easier — create something similar to what is getting the most traffic and be sure to post on the most active source.
— Dr. Bob Clarke
Here is what that looked like in August. In the 30-day window he was looking at, one post had separated itself from the rest of the archive. This is how Bob described it:
“The traffic for this post was substantial (#5 in last 30 days) and the average duration (how long someone stayed on and read the post) was much higher than average.”
The post was his piece on staying consistent when life keeps getting in the way.
What he did with that reading wasn’t to push the post harder. “So I created another post that was adjacent to it” — a companion piece on restarting a business after losing momentum.
What the two reports gave him isn’t a result. It is a rule he can run again the next time he opens them: find the post that is working, find the channel it is working in, and write the next thing next door to it.
A note on the screenshots above: they come from a MonsterInsights demo site, not from Bob’s account. They show the reports he describes, but the traffic figures and page names are sample data.
Run Bob’s Two-Report Check on Your Own Site
The Landing Page report and the Source/Medium report Bob relies on both sit inside your WordPress dashboard with MonsterInsights. Pick a 30-day window and you can see which post is carrying your traffic and which channel brought those readers.
See MonsterInsights PricingResults: What Changed Once He Started Looking
With MonsterInsights, Bob was able to:
- Read a roughly 14% rise in organic traffic over the last 90 days — his own estimate
- See direct sessions up about 35% over the same window, also his estimate
- Get a much clearer month-to-month picture of whether his traffic is rising or falling
- Turn the question of what to publish next into a repeatable check rather than a hunch
- Measure which social platforms are actually paying off and which aren’t
The percentages are the least interesting things on that list, and Bob was careful about them himself.
“It looks like organic traffic is up over the last 90 days by 14% and direct sessions are up about 35%.”
Ninety days of a publishing schedule like his holds a lot of moving parts, and he wasn’t isolating any of them. Those are readings off his own reports, not an experiment.
The outcome carrying the most weight is the month-to-month read. Knowing whether traffic is climbing or slipping tells him whether his last decision was a good one before he makes the next.
That is most of what a content strategy built on real data is: read what happened, write the next thing accordingly, check again.
What He’d Do Differently
When I asked Bob what he would do differently, he gave one answer, and it was short.
I didn’t check my metrics for the first few years of blogging. BIG MISTAKE
— Dr. Bob Clarke
The capitals for emphasis are his. Eighteen years into the business, the part he would change is the beginning of it.
It is worth being precise about what that cost, because it is the one mistake here that can’t be fixed later. Google Analytics can only show you data it collected while it was running. It does not fill in the past — it starts counting the day you install it, and the months before that stay empty.
So the posts Bob published in those early years are still on his site, but there is no record of how they performed at the time. He can see what they do today. He can’t go back and see which of them landed when it mattered, or what he should have written next.
The habit that fixed it is a small one: two reports and a 30-day window. It works the same on an archive of twelve posts as it does on his 400, which is the argument for starting in month one rather than year six.
It is also why setting up your analytics is worth doing before you need the data rather than after.
Eighteen Years In, Still Checking the Reports
Bob and Rosemary started the business in 2008, while both were still working in the lab, and its first years went by without any read on what was landing.
He now decides what to write next from the reports in his WordPress dashboard and a 30-day window.
His advice to anyone still on the fence is one sentence:
If you don’t know your metrics, you are flying blind.
— Dr. Bob Clarke
He went on to say that checking your analytics is how you learn what your readers are enjoying. Eighteen years and more than 400 posts in, that is still what he opens the reports for.
Don’t Publish Your First Few Years Blind
The one thing Bob would change is the years he wrote without reading any of it — and that data never comes back. Setting up MonsterInsights takes a few minutes and puts the same two reports he uses in your WordPress dashboard, so your next post is a decision rather than a guess.
Get Started With MonsterInsightsMore MonsterInsights Case Studies
- Marketing Seattle: A Small Business + MonsterInsights Case Study
- Translating Data Into Action: A Travel Blog + MonsterInsights Case Study
- From Reports to Results: A WooCommerce + MonsterInsights Case Study
Follow us on Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube for more Google Analytics tips.