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How do you Measure the Effectiveness of Your Company’s Blog?
Content Marketing Internet Marketing

How do you Measure the Effectiveness of Your Company’s Blog?

By Mainak Biswas October 12, 2015 - 2,236 views

Companies have objectives which invariably impact every aspect of their blog. A business blog has different goals to fulfil. These may include building the brand, expanding business reach or supporting sales. However, to accomplish such goals, it is imperative to ensure that the blog is in line with your company/brand. But how do you initiate it? The foremost important thing is to measure its effectiveness on your business and audience engagement. This is referred as Marketing Performance Measurement.

The metrics include indicators of the efficiency of your content supply chain. Although there are enough tools to measure your blog’s effort, it is more important to know –

  •  What to measure?
  •  How to measure?
  •  What to do with the data once they’re uncovered?

Before you start analyzing your metrics, here are the four most important grounds to measure first:

Production of Content   

This metrics will help you to manage the –

  •  Number of blog posts planned, in the process and ready to be published
  •  Frequency of blog posts posting
  •  Average time to and from the idea to the publication of a blog post
  •  Total costs involved in the production, promotion and distribution

Outlining Creative Elements

You tasks include-

  •  Determine who will write the post
  •  Ensure the blog has one consistent voice
  •  Verify whether the content tells a story, be contextually relevant, have a point of view and sound like a real person
  •  Check there isn’t any grammatical error
  •  Test the color scheme, typography, post length and use of other media
  •  Develop an editorial calendar

Performance of the Content

The metrics should cover

  •  Social media link shares, likes and tweets
  •  Unique visitors, number of page views and average time on site
  •  Page depth and session duration
  •  Number of visits, bounce rate, percentage of return visitors, page per visit

Marketing Pipeline

 You need to monitor

  •  New leads generated and existing leads touched
  •  Percent and money value opportunity generated, touched and won
  •  Return on investment

Here are the blogging metrics you should measure every month to best gauge the success of your blog

Clicks – How Often and How Much

If lead generation and how much revenue gained are your top priority, you need people to find and engage with your content. Measuring clicks provide directions to a marketer. They are the greatest indicator of who is clicking, from where they’re clicking, whether your topics are resonating with your audience and how well your post is performing in the search engines. For instance, HubSpot, marketing automation software can give you a better understanding of who is clicking and where specific clicks are coming from. Similarly, clicks on and around a publish date give you an insight into how well your posts are resonating with the target audience.

You may also include a Call-To-Action button in your blog content. You can use it as a means to promote your other blog post offers and track how effective your blog is at generating leads. However, put something valuable within the CTA to inspire readers to click on it.

Inbound links –  More Inbound Links Indicate Higher Rank in Search Engines

If you make it a point to link other’s valuable content in your own blog post, they would also reciprocate the same in their content. It helps with your ranking on search engines. This is an indication that others have found your content helpful enough to link to it on their own website.

You can use Google Analytics, Open Site Explorer, Backlink Watch or SEO profiler to measure inbound links in content.

Blog Search Performance

The foremost ways to measure the performance of your blog is to find out

  • How many visitors your blog is attracting?

The number will indicate how successful you are at attracting visitors to your website. You get measurements of total visitors, new visitors, return visitors and direct visitors. Google Analytics will take you a step further. This Analytical tool will show you the types of visitors viewing your blog.

  • What is the number of subscribers to your blog?

People subscribe to high-quality content. Subscribers will promote your brand and also lead to product purchases and event participation. Tools like Spring Metrics or Google Analytics helps you to measure the total number of feed subscribers.

  • How do the visitors behave?

Tool like CrazyEgg measures the user behaviour and interactions.  You get detail data about how visitors interact with the information on your page, what they actually do, how far do they scroll and at what place they stop viewing or deciding to leave comment, make a purchase or subscribe.

Social Shares

Take the time to discover what factors cause readers to share your post. Indeed, social media buttons on your blog post pages are a direct indicator of the level in which people find your content helpful. Research and studies show that readers share content that-

  •  Induces happiness
  •  They found quite valuable
  •  Are helpful to others

Social analytics tools like Open Site Explorer is effective in measuring the volume of social shares any blog post on your website is generating. With each click of the social media button, you’ll receive confirmation that readers enjoyed your content and was engaged with it.

A successful content strategy is aligned with measuring the revenue generated from it. This is simple if your blog posts are aligned with the premium content like eBooks that are confirmed ways to bring in business. You may also find several free analytical tools that will help you measure the impact of your blog on the business.

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