Blogging allows you to build a presence in your industry while establishing yourself as a source of quality information for your users.
Well-crafted blogs drive traffic to your site and encourage your users to engage with your business, accomplishing your ultimate business goal to generate revenue.
If you are not tracking the content performance of your blog, however, you are not utilizing this content marketing strategy to its full potential.
After you create quality content and promote your blog through social media and other content marketing tools, the final step in managing your blog is to measure the content performance of your blog post.
So, how do you do this?
First, let’s talk about the basics.
If you are not tracking the success of your website, you are not utilizing content marketing to its full potential.
What Are Your Marketing Goals?
Hopefully, you have established your content marketing goals long before launching your blog, but if not, now is the time to do so!
- What is the purpose of your blog?
- What do you hope to gain from posting?
- Are you trying to gain traction in your industry?
- Do you want to increase your social media influence?
- Maybe you want to improve your SEO or inbound traffic.
- Is your ultimate goal lead generation?
After you have narrowed down your goals (and write these down as part of your content marketing strategy), there are some tools to help you measure your content performance and the success of your blog.
The tool we will talk about here, though, is Google Analytics.
The Basics: What is Google Analytics?
Google Analytics is a free tool that allows you to track the successes of your digital content strategy by monitoring all activity associated with your website.
Note: You must enable Google Analytics access to your website by installing a tracking code. To do that, please watch the video below.
You should check a few different reports in Google Analytics to track the performance of your blog.
1. Audience Overview
The report gets even more granular by allowing you to track what is happening within the sessions. These can be anything from single or multiple page views to events to interactions and transactions. You can also see information about your users.
- How many visitors did you have?
- How many users are new to your site, and how many have been there before?
As the name suggests, this tab allows you to see your website and blog’s overall traffic patterns. It is the best feature for tracking growth patterns.
2. Site Content Performance
Take note of the average linger time for your blog pages. This number can give you a great idea of how long people are taking to read through your content.
- Are they speed-reading through substantial posts?
- Or are they taking the time to absorb and learn with intention?
Some useful parameters to consider:
- If it’s over two minutes, your visitors are at least perusing through your content.
- It takes less than 30 seconds, and chances are your blog is too dull for the average reader. If this is the case, it’s time to rework your content strategy.
3. Referring Sources
A referring source is a source that directs traffic to your blog. This metric allows you to see exactly where your referrals are originating. Tried-and-true referring sources are social media platforms, specifically X and Facebook, in most cases. This tab is one of your best tools for strategizing how you promote your blog and business in general, as it allows you to see which outside sources drive the most traffic to your site.
Select the best-performing sources and take advantage of running paid promotions on these platforms to market your blog correctly.
4. Social Signals
It’s crucial to continually measure the success of your website to ensure you are generating quality content and optimizing your strategy to deliver the best results for your business.
Outside of Google Analytics
5. Lead Generation
If lead generation is your primary goal—and for most businesses, it probably is—you’ll want to become very familiar with the functionality of your preferred marketing automation tool. There are a slew of different options out there, but one of the primary purposes of these tools is to track the number of leads your blog and website generate.
Examples of leads are people signing up for a subscription to your blog or filling out a form to learn more about your services.
6. Engagement
How people are engaging with your posts in the comments sections is another critical thing to consider.
- Are they commenting?
- Are you commenting back?
Engagement isn’t limited to social media. If people are making comments directly to your blog that is a great sign your readers are genuinely engaging in what you are saying. Please take advantage of these interactions and offer feedback to their commentary. It’s crucial to be aware that not all comments will be positive. Make sure you cover how to handle negative feedback in your content marketing strategy.
7. Inbound Links
Finally, inbound links are similar to referrals in the sense an outside source is directly linking back to your website or blog. These links are a significant boost for your SEO and overall reach.
For example, if there is an article about your business on Business Insider that links directly back to your blog, this counts as an inbound link.
In Conclusion
It’s crucial to continually measure your blog’s content performance to ensure you are generating quality content and optimizing your strategy to deliver the best results for your business.
Remember, the point of tracking measurements is to determine whether you are meeting your blog’s goals. These metrics will help you analyze the methods you are using to reach those goals and allow you to better plan your content.
