How to Measure Basic Blog Post Performance
So, you finally took the plunge and joined the content marketing revolution to support your business. What’s next? It’s no secret that effective content marketing is an investment in both time and financial resources. Maintaining an active blog plays a huge role in increasing visibility for your business, driving traffic to your website and improving your SEO performance.
Maintaining an active blog plays a huge role in increasing visibility for your business, driving traffic to your website and improving your SEO performance.
In order to track your company blog progress over time, it’s crucial to understand how to analyze the success of your content so you can determine if you are achieving a positive ROI over time.
Luckily, there are dozens of critical blog metrics and key performance indicators (KPIs) you can leverage to determine the success of your business blog — even in its infancy. Learn more about blog metrics and overall engagement metrics you can use to report and optimize your digital marketing strategy.
Blog Key Performance Indicators
Your company’s blog is an opportunity to tell the story of your company, while delivering your customers relevant content that helps them understand who you are and what you do. There are a number of different avenues to measure content performance. However, with so many components to measure you can easily get overwhelmed with the details, and some metrics may not be super relevant to your business at this stage in your content marketing journey. Below are some top level blog metrics and critical insights to consider while gauging the success of your blog content.
Organic Blog Traffic and Source of Traffic
Organic blog traffic is a key metric for many digital marketing initiatives, and ultimately, it’s vital to each aspect of the marketing funnel. “Organic” refers to website traffic that is unpaid (in other words, earned) for example, if the user is coming from Google or another search engine.
"Organic" refers to website traffic that is unpaid (in other words, earned) for example, if the user is coming from Google or another search engine.
Tracking organic blog traffic allows you to view how many users are accessing your blog during a period of time, and can be a great indicator of how your long-form content is resonating with your target audience.
Be sure to set up Google Analytics to help track the performance of your blog content. Producing a monthly report that analyzes how your blog posts are performing is a great place to start, and can help to establish benchmarks to track against moving forward. Google Analytics also allows you to view a breakdown of traffic sources so you can easily determine if users are coming from search engines, social media channels, and more.
Visibility
Organic visibility is another KPI that can determine how well a blog article ranks organically within a search engine.
Visibility represents the impact of your blog posts in the form of direct queries the posts rank for, as well as indirect ranking boosts like internal links which help support other transactional pages like product and service pages.
Visibility represents the impact of your blog posts in the form of direct queries the posts rank for, as well as indirect ranking boosts like internal links which help support other transactional pages like product and service pages. There are a number of ways to increase your blog’s visibility, including creating content that your audience is actively searching for, creating content that outperforms competitors and using an SEO platform to ensure you’re using proper keywords.
Visits
Another metric you can analyze within organic traffic is total unique visits and visitors per blog post. Visits are closely tied to your organic traffic data, and can help you understand whether or not a blog post is successful by tracking new and return visits.
Visits are closely tied to your organic traffic data, and can help you understand whether or not a blog post is successful by tracking new and return visits.
By tracking your visitors through Google Analytics, you can determine whether or not the majority of your organic traffic is coming from repeat visitors, new visitors or a combination of both. While new visits on your blog is great, having return visitors can indicate that you’re building customer loyalty and satisfaction.
Click Through Rate
Click through rate (CTR) is arguably one of the most important metrics to include in your content marketing reports.
Click through rate (CTR) is arguably one of the most important metrics to include in your content marketing reports.
You can use Google Search Console to analyze your blog’s CTR, and see how it measures up with the average. While monitoring CTR, you should also be aware of your bounce rate, in other words the rate in which a customer will leave your site once they’ve arrived. A high bounce rate can indicate that while a customer may be intrigued by the content initially, they aren’t engaged enough in the content to stay on the page and read it.
Engagement
Engagement is another metric that can give you additional insight as you analyze blog performance. Engagement can be defined by any action taken by potential customers on your post, including comments, “likes,” social shares and more.
Engagement Engagement can be defined by any action taken by potential customers on your post, including comments, "likes," social shares and more.
Blog engagement can help to boost keyword/SEO performance within search engine. In order to boost engagement, be sure that your marketing team is creating content that is authentic, relatable and informative to increase the chance of it being shared by potential customers. Try to end each blog article with a call to action (CTA) that either includes internal links on your website or external links to your social media channels.
Conversions/Conversion Rate
Ultimately, the goal of driving customers to your website is to result in some kind of conversion. This can include phone calls, emails, direct website sales, newsletter subscriptions and more. Incorporating your blogs in email marketing can have a huge ROI in terms of conversions, engagement and overall impressions. Developing relevant, high quality blog content can help you to build a solid email list, allowing you to continuously engage with your customers, segment audiences and deliver tailored content specific to their needs.
Work with an Agency
Content marketing is a huge undertaking, which is why you need a qualified marketing team of blog analytics experts behind you to support your goals. At WT Digital Agency, we work with small to medium-sized businesses to help strategize and execute your digital marketing plans, acting as an extension of your team. We pride ourselves on marrying strategic creativity and imaginative problem solving with analytics, technology and and data to best serve our clients with their goal in mind.
Want to learn more about measuring the success of your blog content and overall digital marketing strategy? Contact us to discuss your marketing needs.
About the Author
Kevin Bossons
Senior Digital Strategist
With over 15 years of experience in digital marketing and search engine optimization, Kevin has grown from an SEO contractor to Senior Digital Strategist at WT Digital Agency.