Nobody blogs just for the sake of blogging – everyone wants their blog to be read and those that blog to enhance brand value or product sales need their blogs to be not only widely read, they also need it to be regularly crawled by all the major search engines. So how do we go about measuring the success of our blogging activity?
The answer lies in blogging metrics made available through a variety of sources the most famous being, Google analytics. Every week the blogger needs to take a deep look into your page views, traffic sources and conversions because these are good indicators on content that works for you and content that doesn’t. Any strategy changes will instantly reflect in reader behavior which in turn, will be reflected in the stats. Search engines too respond to strategy changes and will raise or lower the page ranking accordingly.
Bloggers who use blogging metrics are far more likely to be successful and fair better than their competitors than bloggers who don’t. The increasing quantum of blog content added to the net each minute of each hour of each day makes blogging highly competitive. Readers are spoilt for choice. Since there is no way a blogger can reduce the blogging content out there, the blogger instead has to redouble efforts at getting noticed. Under these circumstances, utilizing and applying blogging metrics in real-time will give the blogger significant advantage above their competitors.
To begin with, the blogger needs to understand his or her own goals and reason behind the blog. Once the goals are understood, the next step would be to select the metrics that offer the most actionable intelligence. Here are a few powerful metrics that provide a wealth of information.
The Visitor Metrics
It provides information as to the number of folks who visited the blog in a given period of time. It can even provide insight into their geographical location. So if your blog content is aimed primarily at say people living in and around New York City, then the visitor metrics will be a good indicator of your success.
The Page View Metrics
Page view metrics provide the blogger with information on how many times each individual blog and page was viewed. This is a good way to find out your more popular blogs or blogging content. It is provides an indication of content that works and content that does not.
Closely related to the page view metrics is the ‘Pages per Visit’ metrics.
This metrics indicate individual visitor activity. Does the visitor read one blog and then click to another blog? The ‘pages per visit’ metrics is a good indicator of your overall success and whether or not the content you are putting out is yielding results.
The Bounce Rate Metrics
How many folks visit just one page and quite? The bounce rate read along with time spent on the site is the best indicator of the success or failure of the title of your blog. Very often people visit a blog and find that the content is not what they expected. These people will leave the site within seconds. A high bounce rate and very low time spent on the site is a good indicator that the page titles are not in line with the blog content.
These and other metrics help chart your path to blogging success.
