Think about your goal for your blogging efforts. It could be getting more interactions, or if you have a company blog, it could be getting more sales or leads.
Now look at the metrics you are tracking to determine if your blogging efforts are working. You should be able to draw a clear line from the metrics you are measuring, back to your goal for your blog.
For example, many people like to track the traffic their blog gets, or how many RTs their posts get. But if your goal is to get more sales and/or leads via your blog, and the blog’s traffic isn’t coming from places where your potential customers are, how valuable is it to know what your traffic is? Or if your goal is to get more interaction, traffic levels might not be that important.
Think about the actions you want your visitors to take (that tie back to your blogging goals), and then measure the metrics that tie back to the desired behavior.
For example, let’s look at two possible blogging goals; Getting more sales/leads, and getting more comments.
If your goal is to get more sales and leads via your blog, some of the metrics you could track would be referrals from the blog to your website (or a specific product page. Or number of emails asking for more information about your products. Or number of times a visitor uses your Contact Form.
If you want to get more interactions on your blog, you could track time spent on the blog, number of comments left, number of emails, and number of pageviews. Time spent on the blog and number of pageviews suggests the amount of time people are spending interacting with your content. If they are spending a lot of time and viewing a lot of pages and NOT commenting, that could suggest that you need clearer calls to action for encouraging comments, and I’ll talk more about calls to action on your blog later this week.
But put some thought into what actions you want your visitors to take on your blog, then make sure you are measuring the metrics that tie back to the desired behavior.
We’ll be discussing this tonite during #blogchat on Twitter starting at 8pm CT. Please stop by!
Hey Mack,
I find that a lot of bloggers are not studying their blog statistics nor do they have specific goals in mind for their blogs. Many are shooting in the dark and are hoping to get lucky and get lots of traffic and sales. Successful blogging requires a business mindset to ensure that the blog is run proactively rather than passively.
I won’t miss the chat tonight. Great topic Mack.
.-= Robyn from Sam’s Web Guide´s last blog ..Will Social Media Marketing Consistently Outperform Search Engine Optimization? =-.
Robyn I think you are right about ‘shooting in the dark’, I think many bloggers do this. Without a clear sense of direction and goals to drive your efforts, you can waste a LOT of time chasing and tracking meaningless metrics.
Great topic; I’d also like to see discussed: what tools users of wordpress hosted blogs (i.e. name.wordpress.com) can utilize to measure their blog’s performance — or do you need to move to self hosting to get more actionable metrics?
.-= Ksenia Coffman´s last blog ..Primer on Twitter Chats =-.
It is just like anything else we do in life. We need to set up goal, work towards it and more importantly have to set up measurable criteria for that goal so that we know if we are on the right track. Good post.
.-= Vinh Khoa´s last undefined ..If you register your site for free at =-.
You couldn’t have said it better, Vinh! Unless we set up a strategic plan or goals to track our performance with defined and measurable goals, how are we to know if we are actually successful and hitting our numbers! This is also the exact reason to hire project managers or virtual assistants; they help make sure everything is on track!