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Measurements and Metrics You Should Be Using to Improve Your Blogging

Monday 26 January 2015

8 minute read

By Sarah Burns

How can you ensure that what you're blogging about is actually read, enjoyed and appropriate for your audience? Thrive investigates metrics and measurements...

Sometimes blog writers, particularly when there is only one for your company, can focus too much on topics they prefer and are knowledgeable of, rather than others that would be beneficial to the audience (but the blogger has less expertise in).

It is this danger that makes it important to ensure you have perfectly aligned content for your different buyer personas - each persona requires different topics, services, approaches and communications, which you need to meet equally, otherwise your going to have more of one kind of customer over another. 

Metrics and measurements for blogs work well to analyse if your current content production is satisfying your audience and can establish gaps in your content creation schedule...

4 Metrics to Measure for a Defined Blogging Strategy

Social Shares

It's obvious that if somebody is willing to share your content with whichever network they're a part of then they must agree with you / find it helpful. Often there is one of three possible reasons for an individual sharing your content:

  1. They're aware it will help others in their network.
  2. It helped them.
  3. Your content makes them look smarter.

Exceptional content can often evoke a reader to believe all three of these expectations have been met. We can easily see how many social shares have been established, by reviewing our referral clicks. 

Typically speaking, you should review the success of your content creation on a weekly basis, checking engagement and social share metrics to see how you improve / stay the same / or decrease in performance.

Inbound Links

It is true that the more people who link to your content on their own websites can benefit your page authority and in turn, boost your rank in search engine results.

Remember that once a person links to your content you're being engaged with by their audience too - which is why guest blogging is an excellent idea - and increases these people's likelihood of engaging with you.

In simple terms, if Company A which they work with is essentially promoting your company - Company B - they're going to be more likely to go with you anyway. 

Older posts will get inbound links more than a new post - it's all about waiting and allowing your content to be found - so reviewing this inbound links is required much less often. 

It is known in the marketing industry that content which is 6 months or older gets more page authority and inbound links than newer stuff because it's been "out there" for so long (obviously, your content has to be great too!). 

Clicks

Duh! Some 'experts' in the blogging field will refer to clicks as vanity measurements - after all surely it is only generated leads and revenue that matter? - wrong!

You need to ensure that people find your content then engage (see 'social shares') in the first place. Of course, we need to ensure deeper reviews are undertaken to see where they're clicking from and where they go after, however, clicks are the greatest indication that your content is on target for your audience.

Many blogging platforms will have tools to measure click rates and ideally they should be reviewed on a regular basis. Remember, once your blog post is out there, it can be clicked on many or few times, at any time.

Revenue

We all like this metric to be good!

Being able to track revenue back to content is important for ensuring your strategy is actually proving profitable for your company. However, this can be hard to measure.

If you have ebooks and downloads attached to blog posts, it can be possible to use these downloads as profit measuring metrics.

Otherwise you should strategise your content into campaigns and measure the profits of each campaign as a whole. 

Consider which products / services you want to push and put together a marketing campaign - which is more than just a single blog post - to determine how long your sales process is and what your monthly earnings may amount to.

Thrive says...

It's important to actually drive traffic to your blog, regardless of how you measure or how often you post content and measure the metrics of this. However, the most important question is how to drive relevant traffic.

Use our blogging guides to answer your content creation challenges in a pain-free way...

Find more like this via Blogging.

If you're looking to embark on a website build project, whether it's completely from scratch or a site refresh, our ebook will give you the knowledge to make your project as stress-free as possible.

The Website Design Handbook for Businesses

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