The performance of the blog can be measured in many ways. The blog success depends on the visitors, more the visitors more the successful blog is. The blog owners should analyze the traffic of the blog, there are lot of tools available on internet to watch the traffic of your website.
website analytics
Webalizer
Webalizer is traffic tool which comes with your hosting control panel. You can watch the statistics of your blog and website. The weblizer have following features.
1- It provide you daily visitors data which you can compare with other days.
2- Average page views by visitors.
3- Search terms used by viewers to reach your website
4- Demographic statistics by percentage of each country and networks.
5- Most entry pages and exit pages of your website.
6- Reference sites of your blog.
Webalizer is not considered reliable traffic analytic tool because it include the robot visits.
Google Analytics
This is the most reliable and favorite tool among bloggers and site owners world wide. It is a free tool by Google. It is not tricky to access and set your domain to be track by google bot. You just have to insert a code provided by Google to your website in order to track the visitors and trend. The statistics are based on daily, weekly, monthly and yearly base.
Analytics give the complete picture of your visitors. It give you the stats of unique visitors, page views and returning visitors. The bounce rate and new visitor percentage can be seen in your website stats.
There are many more figures available which include demographic, technology, behavior and social information which at end can assist you to improve your website marketing.
Alexa
Alexa is another famous website which provide statistics of your website in term of your popularity. The more you have visitors the more rank you will get on Alexa. Alexa rank is calculated through reverse points system, where the less digits you have in your statistics consider better your website rank is. In my opinion the alexa ranking is not reliable. It does not eliminate the bot or crawler visits is result giving not the true pictures. More over Alexa detailed statistics is not available for all websites. It only show the detail statistics of top 100000 websites globally.
There are many other tools available in the market which can measure the performance of your website, the above are the most famous and commonly use by web developers.
Alexa is very good tool for detecting your performance .Some useful information indeed.I almost see my different sites ranking,backlinks from alexa every day.And its a great method