Blog Metrics – yes, really this time!

Yesterday I launched into the subject of blog metrics and rapidly realised that the first step in the process was missing! I immediately switched tack and covered a simple set of goals for a blog. On reviewing this list I believe these would be appropriate objectives for any professional service business.

Tracking the right blog metricsI selected the objectives for my blog from an article published by Heidi Cohen for the Content Marketing Institute, 21 Real Blog Metrics Your Company Needs to Track. I didn’t feel that I wanted, or needed, to track all 21 goals and measurements.

I’ve now added the suggested, simple measurement criteria from the article against each objective.

1. Attract my target audience

  • Count visits and unique visitors
      • Where do your visitors come from?
      • Where specifically do they go on your site?

 

2. Get potential clients to spend time engaged with my content and brand

  • Time on site to show how engaged readers are
      • What is the average time people spend on the site?
      • How much time do people spend on specific pages?

 

3. Build an audience for my content

  • Measure sign-ups for your RSS feeds and emails lists to determine if the blog is helping you build an online following.

 

4. Increase sales (also expand cross-sell and upsell)

  • The number of targeted promotion codes used and click-throughs to purchase or place in cart. Does assigning more information help readers make better and/or faster purchase decisions?

 

5. Support sales with appropriate content

  • Use call-to-action and unique promotional codes to track results.

 

6. Improve my SEO efforts

  • Measure inbound links. How many sites are linking into your blog? How influential are they?

 

7. Get the attention of experts in my field

  • Measure outbound links. How many outbound links do you have?

 

8. Expand reach cost-effectively and maximise social media shares

  • Count social media shares and note which platforms readers use (such as Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Google+ and others).

I feel that this is enough for me to monitor and review as measures of how effective my blog posts are in meeting my personal objectives.

 

Other Blog Metrics

By the way, if you want to measure things like Raw Author Contribution, Holistic Audience Growth, “Citations” and “Ripple Index” I have found a great plugin for WordPress called Blog Metrics by Yoast.  I couldn’t resist and have installed it!

The Blog Metrics plugin calculates the following:

  • Raw Author Contribution:
    • average number of posts per month
    • average number of words per post
  • Conversation Rate:
    • average number of comments per post without your own comments
    • average number of words used in comments to posts

both for all the time you’ve been blogging and for the last month. It then adds these values in a page on your WordPress dashboard. I now freely confess that perhaps I shouldn’t have been quite so hasty dismissing these measurements as I’m finding them interesting….or perhaps I’m becoming a bit too geeky and sad 😉

Are there any other blog metrics that you track that you feel should be added to this list?

Kim

Pin It on Pinterest

Share This
Skip to content