Most businesses have a blog on their website which (hopefully) gets updated regularly with relevant content for their target audience. You might feel like your content is interesting and engaging but how do you measure how your blogs are performing. By keeping track of the key metrics you can identify ways to improve the reach and performance of your blogs and to ensure you are getting a good return on investment for your blogging efforts as well as hitting the objectives your business you’ve set.
If you haven’t already, you need to set the goals and aim or writing content for your blog. Here are some examples of what you could aim to achieve:
- Drive more traffic to your website
- Raise the profile of your business
- Engage with your current customers
- Gain new customers
- Share and gain expertise within your area and industry
The Tool To Use For Measuring Your Blog Success – Google Analytics
Google Analytics is an excellent tool to use and it’s free as well! With it, you are able to monitor the number of visits your blog had, the average visits for each individual post to see if any content got a particularly high number of visits and seeing the source of the blog traffic, did it come through organic traffic, email or perhaps through social media?
Bounce Rate
This is one of the important metrics you’ll need to look at, and keep in mind this can be higher for blogs than other pages on your website. For those who don’t know, the bounce rate is the percentage of visitors to a particular page on your website who navigates away from the site after only viewing one page. If a user finds your blog through a search engine like Bing or Google, they will read the page they are directed to and will normally find the information they are looking for and then leave unless you provide them with a reason to visit more pages on your website or providing a call-to-action (CTA) for them to perform a desired action like getting in touch by filling out a contact form or purchasing something from your website.
However, if someone visits your website, they are there for a reason and would be more likely to spend time looking around the site. Reducing your bounce rate is beneficial as it shows your visitors are interested in your content, if you see that your bounce rate is over the 65% mark, it would be wise to look further into why they could be leaving and testing different things to see.
Conversions
A conversion can mean different things to different companies, not everyone shares the same goal or thoughts on what a conversion is to their business. For some, it might mean more sales, for others it could be leads generated. For many, blogs serve as a help to generate sales or leads by building a trust between the reader and writer. By writing good content for your target audience, you are creating a foundation for a long lasting customer relationship, the blog should serve as a jumping off point for a call-to-action (CTA).
Offer your readers an opportunity to sign up to your newsletter which will offer them more relevant blog posts and potential offers, however, ensure any emails you send out to your customers are GDPR compliant.
Average Length Of Stay
Now, this might not mean a lot to many but it’s good to see how long our website visitors are staying on a specific page, whether it’s the main blog page or a specific blog you’ve written. People’s attention spans are decreasing and with the increase in digital distractions, digital marketers need to work harder to get visitors to take the time to read a blog. This metric provides insight and is an indication of how compelling your blogs are to read. In order to increase the average length of stay and while the same time decreasing the bounce rate, you have to ensure your blog posts provides the information they are after, are easy to read and offer more than just text, including imagery is one way.
Page Views Per Visit
The intention behind your blog posts is to raise awareness and engagement with your brand. It’s a great part of your digital marketing strategy to grow your business online too. Page views per visits is a metric that provides information on your success at encouraging multiple interactions. If a visitor is looking at several pages, the changes are they like what you are providing them in terms of information found on your blog and on your website. For each post they read, it’ll increase your brand’s recognition and trust which could, in turn, lead to a conversion. You can help increase that by embedding relevant links into blog posts that would bring the readers to additional pages to the related anchor text.
Social Shares
A way of sharing your content is through your social media platforms, however, it’s important to do this carefully. The reason being, you want to set the right expectations for your followers on your social media channels. If you don’t take them to a blog about what you’ve mentioned in your social media post, they are more likely to leave which decreases the average time they have stayed, as well as increasing the bounce rate because they haven’t found the information they are looking for based on the wrong expectations that were set. You can check in Google Analytics to see what channel is bringing in the most traffic, how long they are staying for, the bounce rate and seeing if they are completing the desired goals you have set. You can also check the metrics provided on the platform, Twitter has analytics, Facebook offers Facebook Insights and so forth. By looking into this you will learn what posts people engage with the most, check to see if there’s a specific pattern for the posts you’ve published and more.
Conclusion
By looking at these metrics you can determine if the content you are writing is what your target audience are after and if they are finding it valuable. Based on the information you gather from Google Analytics and your social media platform’s analytics, you can work out what is working well and what needs further improving. Put your audience first and think what they would like to learn more about. Obviously, not everyone can be pleased every time, however, aim to ensure the majority of your audience find what you are writing useful and worth reading. If you feel you need a hand to improve the success of your blog, get in touch with us today.