If your company used a “ready, fire, aim” strategy when launching its blog, you may be wondering whether it is a worthwhile marketing tool. In this article, we’ll look at several ways you can measure — and increase — the value of your company blog.
1.Subscriptions. Tracking the number of your blog’s RSS and email subscribers gives you an indication of reach. Subscriptions have limited value, however, since today many people find content through social media rather than by subscriptions.
2.Social shares. A better indicator of reach is the number of social shares your blog posts receive. If you don’t have share buttons on your blog post template, add them. (This post from 2012 still has good tips for displaying social media buttons.) In addition, since not every share makes use of these buttons, use one of several online tools for tracking social shares of blog content.
3.Comments. Comments are a measure of engagement. A lack of comments may not indicate a problem; a lot depends on the nature of the audience. Limited comments on a consumer product blog is worrisome, whereas not worrisome at all on a manufacturing blog, where readers are more interested in acquiring information and insight than in expressing enthusiasm for the brand.
4.Page views. Some companies are surprised by how many page views old blog posts receive. Page views are a good measure of reach, and high aggregate page views also boost SEO performance.
5.Time on page. If visitors spend several minutes on a blog post page, it indicates your content is interesting and the message is sinking in. Monitoring time on the page helps companies identify their most useful content, and then create more of it.
6.Entry pages. Blog posts may be popular entry pages to your website — significant because these posts are how prospects and customers are finding you.
7.Exit pages/bounces. Monitoring blog posts that are popular exit pages, and posts where the visitor enters and then exits (bounces) helps identify blog content that is not useful — and often enabling you to improve it.
8.Organic and referred traffic. Tracking organic and referred traffic to your blog pages tells you a number of important things, such as how visible your blog posts are on various search engines, and which websites and social media sites are driving people to your blog. If you are getting anemic traffic from Google, you can optimize or re-optimize old content for better exposure; if Twitter is sending five times the traffic of Facebook, you know where to spend your time on social media.
9.Conversions. A well-designed company blog should have conversion elements: soft conversions such as free downloads, and hard conversions such as scheduling an appointment or placing an order. Tracking conversions is a strong indicator of sales lead and revenue generation, and probably the most concrete metric available for establishing the business value of your blog. Note, however, that conversion tracking alone does not convey the full value of your blog; a person may gain awareness of your brand by reading your blog posts, but only months later decide to inquire or purchase.
10.Links. Monitoring inbound links to your blog home page and blog posts gives you a strong indicator of the SEO value of your blog. Strong inbound links increases organic search visibility of individual posts and your domain as a whole. In addition, acquiring links from high-authority websites is a strong indicator that you are producing high-quality content and increasing brand recognition.
All of these ways to calculate the value of your blog provide important insight, but none of them contain all the information you need. Try to track most of them in as much depth as is practical, and review trends monthly or quarterly. Positive trends are encouraging even if the raw numbers are modest, and negative trends should also be welcome, as they provide a blueprint for how to improve the ROI of your blog.
Author Bio:
Brad Shorr is the B2B Marketing Director of Straight North, an Internet marketing firm with headquarters near Chicago. Brad writes frequently on B2B marketing topics that can be seen on the Straight North Google plus page.
