How can you measure blog results (otherwise known as blog KPIs or key performance indicators)?
The value of blogging for your business is enormous.
It establishes you as an authority in your niche and drives organic traffic that could translate to increased sales.
But how do you know your blogging efforts are giving you a positive ROI?
It can be easy to keep blogging and not know if you are seeing any traction or sales increase.
Plenty of people keep blogging and blogging and blogging and never see any results.
The key as the famous Stephen Covey said “start with the end in mind.”
There are multiple key performance indicators (KPIs) that help you determine the success of your blog.
Read on to discover 20 KPIs you should be measuring for your blog.
Why Are KPIs Important?
KPIs are important because they help you understand the health and performance of your blog.
Once you know what is working and what isn’t working, you can make relevant adjustments. Measuring your KPIs keeps your blog improving and helps you reach success faster.
20 KPIs You Should Be Measuring
1- Total Blog Visit
How many visits does your blog get daily and monthly? Keeping an eye on these stats tells you if you’re growing at a decent rate and if there are any monthly trends.
An example might be, December getting more visits than February, so you know which month needs an extra push. If your blog visits are not growing each month, a plan can be put in place to boost figures.
2- Amount of Sessions
A session is the number of user interactions taken place within a certain time frame. A single session can contain many page views, social interactions, events and e-commerce transactions.
Keeping an eye on the growth of blog sessions, helps you to understand content and marketing effectiveness. If your sessions refuse to budge after a few months, this indicates the need for a new strategy.
3- Traffic Acquisition
Where is your blog traffic coming from? Organic search, social media or referrals? And diving even deeper, check which keywords or social media platforms are sending you traffic.
Knowing this information allows you see where your big opportunities for growth lie. If organic search is suffering, look at your blogs SEO. If your social traffic is minimal, plans can be made to change this.
4- Visits to Blog Homepage
What amount of your blog visits are direct to your blog’s homepage? If your direct traffic is high, this means your blog visitors type the URL of your blog into a browser to find you.
This data helps to get a sense of the blog visitors using your blog.
Direct traffic usually indicates repeat visitors and indirect traffic is mostly new visitors.
If your homepage is getting decent traffic, ensure it’s optimized to grab the details of visitors through email capture forms and lead magnets.
5- Published Posts Count
Tracking the number of blog posts published is essential.
It shows the correlations between blogging frequency and how much traffic you receive for your efforts.
As time goes on, you’ll find a sweet spot to help your blog traffic continually climb.
And, if it stalls, increasing the number of posts you publish could help.
6- Most Viewed Posts
Your most viewed posts are popular for a reason! Find out which posts perform well and you can use the same format and topic to drive more traffic with similar content.
The same goes for underperforming posts.
When you know which these are, you know what your audience are not liking.
7- Is Your Content Being Linked to?
Links are like a vote of confidence to Google that your content is top quality.
Inbound links help to boost your DA (domain authority) and push your content higher up in search so you get more traffic.
Keep a check on the inbound links each post gets.
If its underperforming, maybe the content quality needs to be looked at. Or, maybe your content marketing strategy needs a shake-up.
8- Total Views Per Post
The average views per post is an indicator of performance.
Another thing to watch is if you start to post more, but your views decrease, this could indicate that the quality has been compromised.
It may be better to reduce the number of monthly posts, but opt for an increase in quality and content detail.
Sometimes less is more as the saying goes!
9- Social Shares for Each Post
The social shares for each post helps you to decide which content to post where.
Certain posts may do well on Twitter, but not on LinkedIn for example.
Keeping note of this, allows you to post similar content in the future to the right platforms.
Or you could focus your blog marketing campaign solely on 1 or 2 social platforms, where your ideal customer is reading your content.
10- Number of Post Comments
Tracking post engagement gives you an idea what your readers think of your content and how engaged they are.
If you receive zero comments, experiment with ways to encourage interaction.
You can ask questions or try out a new type of content for example.
If readers are engaged, they’re more likely to share your content and re-visit in the future.
11- Customer and New Lead Generation
While traffic is important, how many of those people are turning into paying customers?
Assess how much of your blog’s traffic is increasing your bottom line.
By knowing this, you can identify whether your post volume, frequency and marketing is working effectively.
If it’s not working, tweaks can be made to turn readers into return visitors and paying customers.
12- Top Lead Generation Posts
Next, you can dive a little deeper and find out which posts are generating the most leads and new customers.
Develop a lead generation report to see which content is the most effective.
Analyze the topic and format of these posts.
In months when your customer goals have dived, this information is extremely handy.
13- RSS Feed Subscribers
How many readers are subscribing to your blog via the RSS feed and how many actually check it?
The number of engaged subscribers tells you a lot about how well your content is doing.
If people just visit your blog and never come back, something needs to change.
Turning one time readers into raving fans is the goal as they will return, share your content and buy your products.
14 – Track Conversion Rates
Conversion rates to track include visit-to-lead and lead-to-customer.
This information helps to decipher where improvements should be made.
By improving the visit-to-lead conversion rate, leads can be increased with the same traffic amounts.
On the flip side, the visit-to-lead results can be improved by keeping the conversion rate the same and increasing traffic.
Track results as you go and tweak your blogging strategy accordingly.
15- Number of Email Subscribers
Email subscribers are the best type of subscribers, because you have access to their inbox and a huge potential to turn them into paying customers.
If your email list isn’t growing, it could be there’s no strategy in place to get them onto an email list.
This shouldn’t be overlooked, as an email list is a goldmine.
Many won’t buy from you initially and need to be warmed up via a series of emails.
16- Page Authority
Over time, the page authority of each blog post should increase as traffic increases.
This is a great indicator of whether your content is being appreciated by Google and your readers.
Use your preferred SEO platform to keep an eye on the page authority of your posts.
You can even check for free by adding the MozBar to your Google Chrome search bar.
17- Key Word Rankings
Keyword ranking is one of the most important metrics to measure on your blog.
There are two things to look at to track how your blog is doing:
- Rankings for keywords you’ve targeted
- Rankings for related keywords you didn’t initially target
If you’ve configured each article well around one keyword, you should naturally start to rank for the main keyword. Another measure of success is when you start to rank for new, related keywords, not initially targeted.
18- Average Position in Search Results
Your average position in search results is important, because it indicates how important Google determines your blog to be as a whole.
The higher your content ranks in search, the more traffic and sales you’ll get.
If your average position gets stuck or starts to fall, change is needed.
This might be slowing down on pumping out content and taking the time to update and improve existing content.
19- Featured Snippets
Featured snippets are brief excerpts for websites that appear at the top of a page in a Google search query.
The featured snippet is automatically pulled by Google from indexed pages they deem as the top authority on a subject.
This is an incredibly valuable spot to be in.
It increases your online visibility and increases your traffic and sales potential.
To snag the featured snippet spot, create in-depth content that gives the best answer to a specific question.
20- Bounce Rate
It’s important to monitor the bounce rate of your posts.
Even if you have a high amount of page views, a high bounce rate means people aren’t engaging.
A low bounce rate can even help you rank higher up in search.
Google sees content with a lower bounce rate as more authoritative. Over time, this helps you to gain more traffic, leads and conversions.
21- Backlinks to Your Blog
Backlinks are an essential ranking factor that increases the authority and traffic to your blog.
Websites with a large amount of quality backlinks, trigger search engines to feature their content high up in search.
Being on the first page for a search term, means you’ll get the lion’s share of the traffic.
Not many people scroll past the first page of Google or Bing. Take steps to grow your backlinks every month and keep an eye on your stats.
22- (Click Through Rates)
CTA is an important metric to monitor for each blog post.
Did the reader like a post enough to click through to another page?
This is important information, showing you which content is performing well.
Monitoring CTA may also bring to light that there was no next clear step for the reader.
Did they bounce away because you didn’t define the next step?
Guide readers on what to do with short blurbs such as ‘’click to read related content’’ or ‘’join my email list here’’.
23- Contact Form Submissions
The amount of contact form submissions you receive is a good indicator of blog growth.
No matter how amazing your content, most people need a little more convincing to part with their cash.
This is where you may receive questions via the contact form.
This is great, because now you have them on your email list. Here, trust can be built and you can show authority on a given subject.
What Are KPIs in SEO (Search Engine Optimization)?
SEO KPIs are studied by marketing professionals to measure the performance of a website in organic search. This information is extremely valuable showing the top performing pages, keywords and parts of a website that need to be worked on.
Final Thoughts on KPIs You Should Be Measuring
As you can see, there are many KPIs you should be tracking for your blog. For continual blog growth, it’s important to keep an eye on this data and take steps to improve the results.
A lot of this information can be found for free in Google Analytics. But for some data, you may need to download extra tools. Reach out if you need help tracking your key performance indicators today.
If you need a ghostwriter to help with your blogging efforts please check out this blog about hiring a ghostwriter
For Further Reading
15 Blog KPIs You Should Be Tracking
The 28 Blog KPIs Content Marketers Recommend You Track
Joel Mark Harris graduated from the Langara School of Journalism in 2007. Joel is an award-winning journalist, novelist, screenwriter and producer.
He has ghostwritten numerous books in all types of genres including true life crime, business, memoir, and self help. With over 1,000 blog posts to his name, he has helped hundreds of business owners scale their business and increase their visibility. You can email him at info@ghostwritersandco.com
