Once you’ve started blogging, you want to know how you’re doing, especially if you haven’t had much interaction (yet). Starting to blog can be frustrating since there’s not much feedback right away. Like other marketing efforts, blogging will be more successful if you measure results to see what’s working (and what’s not). Here are 14 basic blog measurements to help you get an idea of how your blog is doing… Most of these statistics are available in Google Analytics.
- Pageviews – Number of times pages on your blog have been viewed. Ideally you’ll see this trend upwards over time.
- Visits – Number of times people have visited your blog. For each visit, they hopefully viewed more than one page (pageview).
- Visitors – Number of people who have visited your blog (as close as can be calculated). One person (visitor) can come to your site more than once (visits) and view more than one page each time (pageviews).
- Pages/Visit – Ideally people are viewing more than one page when they visit your blog. The pages/visit measurement will give you an idea of whether that’s the case.
- Time on Site – The average amount of time people are spending on your blog. The longer, the better. If your audience is loyal and is visiting every day for your new post, this may be only as long as it takes to read a typical post.
- Bounce Rate - What percentage of people come to your blog and only view one page before leaving? Ideally you’d like this to be low, but it tends to be higher on blogs than other websites since loyal audiences will visit often to read just your newest post.
- Top Content – What content is really resonating with your audience? Keep an eye on this for ideas for future posts and also for putting promotions on popular posts. Possibilities also exist for creating a post series about the topic (with links to the various posts in each).
- Top Landing Pages – Where are people first entering your blog? Because of search engines and other websites sending you traffic, your top landing page may not be your home page. This is good information for running promotions and for future content ideas.
- Comments – How many comments do you get? How many comments do you average per post? Is it increasing? If not, what can you do to improve? Do you have readers who you could ask to comment? Are there fellow bloggers who you could share commenting responsibilities with? Are you directly asking your readers for their input?
- Shares – How often is your content shared? There isn’t a great direct way to get this information. If you have a plugin installed to add the sharing functionality, it probably provides some statistics. Commenting systems like Disqus will also give you some sharing info, as will searches for your blog name on Google.
- Subscribers – How many people are subscribed to your blog? Feedburner (which has a WordPress plugin) provides some good stats and can link into Google Analytics. Feedburner also provides the functionality for people to subscribe to your blog via email which is attractive to many readers.
- Engagement – How engaged is your audience with your content? This really is a culmination of shares, commenting, etc. Plugins such as PostRank can give you some good information. Otherwise, do some searches for your blog name using Google and Twitter searches.
- Referrers – What other websites are sending you traffic? Check these out and thank the referrers. These sites may also be posting opinions about your content, so you should check them out to add your own responses. These sites may also make good places to trade guest posts.
- Keywords – What are the top keywords people are using to find your blog? Are these what you expected? How can you use them in future blog posts to reinforce certain keywords? Are there keywords that you can turn into whole blogs posts (or a series of blog posts)?
Do you blog? What measurements do you use?
(photo by Brittany Culver)
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