One of the hardest parts about blogging is understanding whether it’s having a positive impact on your business. If you’ve ever thought, “How do I know whether my blog is actually working?”, this article on how to measure blog success is for you.
How to Measure Blog Success With Google Analytics
Google Analytics (GA) is an awesome, free tool that lets you understand where your traffic is coming from, what they’re doing on your site, and which of your pages (or blog posts) are getting the most views.
If you’re not sure how to install GA, we have a
quick post to help you figure if you correctly installed it.
Which Metrics Should You Measure?
Google Analytics has a ton of different statistics, fancy words, and things that can be downright hard to understand. How do you know which ones you should look at to measure blog success?
It all boils down to the what makes a difference in your bottom line:
Sessions – This metric will tell you how much traffic your blog is getting. Raw traffic is a good measurement of effectiveness because it will tell you whether or not your blog is growing. You can increase this number through
various promotion strategies.
Bounce Rate – Bounce rate measures how many users left after visiting just one page on your website. The lower this number, the better, because it means people are engaging with your website content and clicking through pages. This metric lets you know whether or not you’re using
good calls-to-action and whether or not your blog posts are
written for engagement. Using
power words can help you increase engagement.
CTA Clicks/Signups – A Call-to-Action (CTA) is a link on your page that calls the visitor to take some sort of action, like subscribe to your email newsletter or
opt-in offer. Clicks and signups tell you how effective your CTAs are. If this number is low, it could mean your CTA isn’t relevant or compelling enough or doesn’t stand out enough. While beyond the scope of this article, it’s good to know month over month signups and unsubscribes as well.
If you’re not an analytical person and need more help understanding Google Analytics, we also wrote a
guide to GA for non-analytical people you can check out.
Other Important Analytics
Of course, Google Analytics tells you about more than just metrics. Other ways measure your blog’s success include knowing your:
Top blog posts – Google tells you which of your blog posts is getting the most traffic and engagement. As you can see in the image below, just navigate to Behavior -> Site Content -> All Pages. This will show you which of your pages has gotten the most views, as well as the average time spent on page and bounce rate.
Traffic sources – This gives you a rough idea of where your traffic is coming from. To find this information, navigate to Overview -> All Traffic -> Channels. From there, you can see referral, social, organic, and direct traffic. Having this information will help you determine which topics are the most effective and should be prioritized.
Other Ways to Measure Your Blog’s Success
Google Analytics is only one way to measure the effectiveness of your blog. There are other tools and metrics you should look at, including:
BuzzSumo – Buzzsumo is a sweet tool that lets you see which of your posts is getting the most shares. Of course, their free version is limited to only five results, but it’s still a good way to see your five most-shared posts.
Engagement – Measuring engagement means measuring comments and shares. This could mean comments on your blog or comments on your social media posts. Your blog posts or social posts with the most comments and/or shares are potentially great topics to discuss further.
That’s all for now, folks! Now it’s your turn – did we miss any important metrics? Do you have any other questions? Drop us a comment to let us know!
