Easy ways to track the performance of your blog


Let's begin this article by looking at the way you track the performance of your company or product blog. It's pretty much just like tracking the performance of your website with a few key differences.

Applying Web Analytics

With regards to tracking blog performance, it's important to know that a blog is actually nothing more than the usual fancy web page. As such, you can use the same web analytics tools and metrics to trace your blog's performance as you use to trace the rest of your website.

Therefore if you're using Google Analytics, for instance, on your main website, you can add Google Analytics code to your blog, as well and then use the Google Analytics dashboard to trace your blog's traffic, pageviews, visitors, and so on. Most web analytics tools can easily be used for blog tracking; it's only a matter of inserting the correct code to the body of your main blog page. Then you track whatever metrics you want to track.

And what metrics in the event you track? In essence, you need to find out how so many people are reading your blog posts, who they are, how much time they spend reading your posts, and where they are available from basic web analytics stuff.

This means you want to track the following metrics:

Pageviews

Track this one with time to see if your traffic is increasing or decreasing.

Unique visitors

Just like with pageviews, helps you track traffic over time.

Session duration

This lets you know whether visitors are fully reading an article or getting turned off before they get towards the end.

Traffic sources

Use this metric to find out where your blog visitors are coming from search engines (therefore, for which keywords), links using their company blogs, and so forth.

What's slightly different about blog analytics when compared with general web analytics is that you want to track these metrics for each individual post on your blog, as well as for the blog itself. You then wish to develop a matrix to check these metrics between all of the posts so you can pick which posts are drawing the most traffic, keeping readers engaged, and the like.

The goal here is to find out which types of posts are getting the most reads and then to write more of them. Identify which posts aren't getting read and post fewer of these. Figure out what's working and why and employ that to fine-tune your blog content going forward.

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Note: This article was sent to us by: Marvin Weaver at 03212011

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