Blogging is a great way to fill the top of the funnel by driving qualified traffic to your site. Think about it: If you’re blogging about topics relevant to your company, the people reading your blog posts are almost certain to have an interest in what your product has to offer. If you’ve ever penned a blog post, you know they are extremely time consuming to write. For this reason, it’s important to measure whether or not your efforts are helping you reach your goals – this is where metrics come in. Tracking a number of valuable KPIs (key performance indicators) will help you work efficiently. Think of KPIs as a way to work proactively and with purpose.
Traffic and Referrals
The first (and obvious) step to a successful blog is to attract people to your blog. What’s the point of writing amazing content if there no one is reading it? Keeping up with how much traffic you drive to your blog and where that traffic comes from is the key to determining what actions you should take to increase traffic. Google analytics is my preferred way of gathering this information.
Use a tool like Google Analytics to learn where your blog readers are coming from.
Once you’ve made sense of the metrics, here are some questions you should be asking yourself:
- Which of my social media channels is driving the most traffic? How can I leverage that channel even more?
- How much of the traffic is organic? How can I leverage the keywords I’m ranking on in the future? (Note: to find out how you rank, check out Webmaster tools).
Top Viewed Posts
Choosing a topic to blog about can oftentimes feel like a guessing game. An inexperienced blogger may randomly choose a topic they think their readers will find interesting. The savvy blogger will know how much traffic their previous posts have generated, and use those insights to help choose future topics. Your past success and failures are both great predictors for future posts. I’d also suggest paying attention to your bounce rate and average visit duration. It’s not about attracting peoples’ attention, it’s about keeping it.
Knowing which posts are driving the most traffic to your blog can help you decide which topics to blog about in the future.
If a post has high visits, low bounce rate, and a high average visit duration, you can feel pretty confident that future posts containing similar content will be successful. Alternatively, if a past post receives few visits, a high bounce rate, and a low average visit duration, you should avoid blogging about similar topics in the future.
Traffic To Your Site:
I have two goals when blogging: provide valuable and actionable information to my readers and fill the top of the funnel. The first part is easy. The second part is where things get a little bit challenging. Measuring how much direct traffic you are driving from your blog to your brand allows you to identify whether or not your efforts are paying off. You can find out how much site traffic was a blog referral by using Google Analytics and looking under “referral sources” for your company website.
I hope this information gives you some insights into the kind of metrics you should be tracking. If you keep close tabs on your blog performance, I promise you’ll get closer and closer to reaching your goals. With KPIs, blogging is no longer a guessing game. Good luck!
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