A successful blog can mean different things to different people and businesses. One company might be seeking higher engagement and PR. Another might be solely interested in converting leads. While another company may want to build a loyal following.
Regardless of your niche, industry or area of expertise, everyone needs the data that will tell them whether or not their blog is successful based on their key performance indicators (KPIs). With all readers coming to your site, engagements and leads, you are sitting on a treasure trove of data that can further fuel your business. You need to make sure you’re tracking all that priceless data correctly.
Welcome to the wonderful world of blog analytics.
Analytics can help you track your impact with impressions, clicks and click-through rates. They can help you understand your traffic performance, your authority, your readership engagement and your lead generation.
Here are the key tracking methods you can use to measure your blog’s success.
Page views and visits
A visit measures the number of times your site was seen by a user. Any time a user views a page on your website this qualifies as a page view. This can tell you how many people are visiting your site, what pages they’re visiting and how your inbound links may be assisting or hindering them from more page views.
Search impressions
These come from the number of times your post has been seen in the Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs). The higher you rank, the more traffic will be driven to your site. If you’re ranking low, it’s time to review your SEO.
Clicks
It’s great the people are searching for your topic, but you need them click. the more clicks, the more traffic. The more traffic, the more potential customers.
Click-through rate
The click-through rate measure the percentage of impressions that resulted in a click. A high percentage means your impressions are doing great. Even if your post had low traffic, if your click-through rate is high, you’re doing something right.
Traffic by channel
The channel refers to the path your readers take to visit your content. This could be coming from social media, email campaigns, landing pages or search engines. This can tell you which channel is most successful for your business.
Time on page vs. bounce rate
You want your readers to spend as much time on your page as possible. Analytics can measure the average time people spend on your site. This can tell you how engaging and relevant your content is. On the other hand, bounce rates refer to people coming to your site or page, finding nothing worth their interest, and leaving. Both metrics will help you gage whether your content is resonating with your audience.
Top traffic posts
By seeing which posts gained the most traffic you can get a better understanding of what content your audience wants. This can help you tailor future blogs to meet your customers’ needs.
The list could go on… But we don’t want to wear you down with too much tactical analytical talk.
We hope you get the point. Analytics are crucial measurements to help you determine the effectiveness of your blogs. Analytics will also help you build your bottom line when it comes to your marketing strategy and budget. DO NOT skip analytics or simply gloss over your indicators. This is priceless data that your business needs.
And we didn’t want to leave you without some tools for tracking your traffic.
Here are some of the best tools for measuring analytics.
- Google Analytics
- Tableau
- Momently
- HubSpot Marketing Hub
- SEMrush
- Google Search Console
- Visitor Analytics
- Clicky Analytics
- Bitly
We wish you the best in digging through your data. If the numbers are overwhelming you, we can help!