Blogs are a great way to digitally market your brand, your business, and even yourself. Blogs are also great because you have plenty of ways to measure the effectiveness, traffic, and user engagement. It’s important to understand the effectiveness of your blog to be able to grasp what the return on investment (ROI) is. If the ROI is low – either improve your blogging or shut it down completely. Conversely, Fisher (2009) found that finding the ROI in Social Media isn’t particularly clear-cut, and that ‘Inability to measure ROI’ was named by marketers as one of the most significant barriers to the adoption of social media tactics. Despite the ROI being hard to pinpoint, this blog post (ironically) attempts to set out the tools available for measuring blog effectiveness, a handy measurement model, and useful guides to blogging metrics available.

The Tools Out There

Wright (2014) suggests the use of different tools for different reasons. For example, Google Analytics is great for measuring the number and the type of visitors. An extra added bonus of this tool is that it is free, however, the report it provides is very basic – Pageviews, Visits, and Bounces. It is all numerical data, and you would have to compare these figures to successful blogs to know how you’re doing. A su

fficient tool to track inbound links (or links that people have followed from another website to end up on yours) is Technorati. If you want to focus more on people’s behaviour whilst on your blog then CrazyEgg you can see exactly where people click on your page and see what actions are taken.

Davide (2015) sings Google Analytics’ praises once again – recommending it for measuring most metrics. But when the focus is on social interactions, there are specialised social measurements platforms such as Klout – which is free! This is a great tool to figure out how engaging your blog is, and whether it’s making people talk. Alternatively, there’s Hootsuite which is a great platform in general to manage multiple social media accounts, but with the added bonus of tracking the engagement of your blog. However, it does come at a price – but a free 30 day trial is available.

How To Measure Your Blog’s Success

Gerry Moran (2013) devised a great table to help group goals together with the questions that go with them, and then listed the metrics that can answer the questions.

“It is key for bloggers and marketers to be able to measure the right activity to help judge its performance and make content and platform changes help reach the right audience with the right message.” – Gerry Moran (2013)

Further to this, Gerry highlights the many ways to measure blog success with the use of these metrics:

• Page views
• RSS feeds and email sign-ups
• Search rankings
• Inbound links
• Outbound links
• CPM
• Fans/followers/readers
• Media links
• Time on site
• Blog, discussion, document views
• Content rating
• Comments
• Likes & comments
• Content clicks
• Questions asked
• Click-through to the web page
• Downloads
• Registrations
• Shares/ Retweets
• Referrals
• Repeat visits
• Inbound links
• Outbound links

Am I the only one who found this all a bit overwhelming? Why can’t measuring a blog’s success just be one thing? Anyway, back to it.

For more advice from Gerry, click here.

Measurement Model For Your Blog

Need something a little simpler with less choice? Yes, me too!

Omkar Mishra (2014) created this model for measuring success on your blog, and it has a more general overview with all metrics being achieved through the use of Google Analytics (the handy tool mentioned earlier).

Awareness is the primary stage of your blog when your contact is discovered by the audience. Once your audience is aware of your blog, converting that awareness factor to interest is of paramount factor. Trust comes after you have built authenticity in the minds of your readers for them to convert in to a regular audience.

Omkar gives a great tutorial on how to use the metrics mentioned within Google Analytics here.

On the other hand, Kayes et al (2012) proposed a centrality aggregation method to measure relative influence scores of bloggers in the network. It is a complex process but their methodology provides a basis for analysis of influential bloggers, who are recognised by businesses as significant forces for product promotion.

Useful Guides:

For a general overview of how to watch your business blog’s performance – check this out: http://blog.hubspot.com/blog/tabid/6307/bid/29315/5-Critical-Metrics-to-Measure-Business-Blog-Performance.aspx

Similarly, a general overview is provided but with a greater focus on Business functions, like generating leads: https://www.sensiblemarketing.com/blog/how-to-measure-business-blogging-effectiveness

For a quick guide on all the tools out there and how to best utilise them, read this: http://www.seoblog.com/2014/02/ways-measure-blog-posts-search-performance/

 

References

Davide (2015) ‘4 Key Metrics  to Better Understand Your Blog’s Performance’, Contentools, 7^th August 2015. [Online] <http://contentools.com/content-marketing/4-key-metrics-to-better-understand-your-blogs-performance/> [accessed 21 April 2016]

Fisher, T. (2009) ‘ROI in social media: A look at the arguments’, Journal of database marketing & customer strategy management. Vol. 16, No. 3, pp189-195

Kayes, I., Qian, X., Skvoretz, J., & Iamnitchi, A. (2012). How influential are you: detecting influential bloggers in a blogging community. In Social Informatics (pp. 29-42). Springer Berlin Heidelberg.

Mishra, O. (2014) ‘How To Measure The Success Of Your Blog With These Metrics’, Business2Community, 11^th May 2014. [Online] <http://www.business2community.com/blogging/measure-success-blog-metrics-0879484#lkFRraSlCE3bBZ6l.97> [accessed 20 April 2016]

Moran, G. (2013) ‘How to Measure the Success of your Blog’, Marketing Think, 29^th September 2013. [Online] <https://marketingthink.com/measure-success-blog/> [accessed 20 April 2016]

Wright, M. (2014) ‘Three Ways to Measure Your Blog Posts Search Performance’, SEO Blog, 12^th February 2014. [Online] <http://www.seoblog.com/2014/02/ways-measure-blog-posts-search-performance/> [accessed 21 April 2016]