5 Metrics to Help You Benchmark Your Blogging Performance

With the right strategy and focus, and when used effectively, blogging can be a powerful marketing tool, especially for business. Creating content around your brand, services, and key propositions will attract targeted traffic at key stages of the research, enquiry and buying process.

By contributing engaging, quality content, you’ll see benefits to your SEO strategy whilst interacting with your target market . You’ll be strengthening your company’s presence within your market, and in turn your brand will become more attractive to prospective customers. If you missed it, you can find blogging tips from our April article “#UrbanBites: Blogging tips“

Creating engagement through your blog

One of the main aims for your blog is to interact, engage and generate brand awareness, drawing attention to your services.

However, before you expect a sudden surge in visits and brand exposure, understand that it takes time to establish yourself. Therefore, maintaining your blog is crucial.

Maintaining a blog is more than planning content and scheduling these to be published at consistent intervals. Blogging is an active and responsive social activity. Otherwise you may be releasing content into the abyss. You’ve put your article out there, but is it easy to come by? Are people actually reading and interacting with what you have to say? These are the answers you want to know, especially when it’s related to conversion rates and ROI.

Having the answers to these questions, allows you the opportunity to refine content, making sure it is successfully reaching and making an impact with your specific audience.

Your blogging experience will become more worthwhile of your time and for your business when using these 5 metrics to help you benchmark your blogging performance.

Here are suggestions of data you should be measuring…

1) Page Views

Monitor your page views, and analyse your findings. When are there spikes in traffic, and what time, day and month were your page views at the highest? Interpret the relation between the content published and when views were at at the highest.

2) Bounce rate

Measure the traffic to your blog, and make sure you are aware of the percentage bounce rate. This being the people who land on your blog, but leave without visiting any further pages.

Tips to improve this:

• Make sure that the content is what the user is expecting. Your reader should be able to digest information easily, and make a decision whether the article is right for their needs. Make sure that the format is attractive and pleasing to the eye. If you’ve filled the blog with heavy blocks of content and no headers, this can be off-putting in terms of people making the effort to read your content.
• Are you suggesting the next step for your visitor? For example, is there a strong call to action, links to related information, or obvious next steps in the user journey.

3) Monitor the percentage of returning readers as well as new readers

This will make you aware of the loyal readership you are gaining within your target market. If you’re attracting a high percentage of new visitors that may be good for growing your readership, but if you’re readers are not coming back you may be educating for the moment rather than building authority and loyalty.

4) Monitor social interactions 

This is a strong indication that your content is relevant and that people are genuinely interested. Monitor the number of times certain content is shared, how many comments are made.

Interact with comments, your audience is qualifying their interest in your knowledge or service, interacting with them builds relationships and encourages further conversation.

5) Conversion rate by search query term or phrase.

You can see that you are being found for what people are searching for, and whether they decided to visit you based on your search listing. You need to then measure whether those visitors went on to enquire or purchase.

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