Blog Analytics: How do you measure the company blog’s performance?

Measuring the performance of your company’s blog is not easy. In truth, I would say the endeavor is an exercise in the illusive. By design, blogs don’t give up customer behavior secrets as easily or as comfortably as a landing page.

There are different topics covered in blog posts, the appeal of those topics to your audience, add in the frequency of posts and multiple authors, and any true measurement becomes difficult, if not impossible altogether.

Consequently, there’s no real surprise when marketers tasked with assessing a blog’s performance struggle measuring it. A common question we hear from marketers is, “What are critical metrics to measure a company blog’s performance would you recommend, and why?”

So, I asked a few of my colleagues at MECLABS this question and here’s what they had to say.

Pay attention to social media metrics

I would include a social measurement of some sort based upon the Google Hummingbird algorithm update, such as +1s or tweets. The reason is because increasingly social syndication is highly correlated with performance in organic search rankings.

My other metric would be something to measure the total impact of the blog upon a core organizational goal, such as revenue based upon an advanced attribution model like the time-decay methodology. The reason for that is to identify how closely blog performance mirrors organizational performance.

 – Jonathan Greene, Business Intelligence Manager, MECLABS

Track where visitors go and how long they stay

My initial thoughts here are time on site and pages per visit. A blog is not a typical site where you build a specific funnel to accomplish a goal. These two metrics would be very useful to measure performance especially if your blog is meant to be informative and build brand awareness.

– Matthew Hertzman, Senior Research Manager, MECLABS

And don’t forget about relevance

For starters, I would recommend looking at metrics that help you assess the relevancy of your content to your audience. One good example of two metrics to help you do this would be number of visits divided by the number of page views.

Sure, there are some other factors to consider depending on your goals, but the overall idea here it to get you started on the path of understanding where people go on your blog and how much content they are consuming on average.

– Ben Filip, Data Sciences Manager, MECLABS

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