Day 20: 5 Tips to Measure the Success of Your Blog

So far you’ve learned about:

• What is a Customer?
• How to Love Your Customers and Market Your Business
• That We Can Spread Customer Love
• How to Leap and Make Someone’s Day
• That if you Want Love, you Only Need to Ask

…plus much more.

Seeing all these amazing posts made me think a lot about what I should write for the #customerlove challenge – because I want it to be very useful to you but at the same time, to cover my area of expertise. I can’t write about something I am not familiar with, can I?

So I decided to write about something that’s not that much covered in our lovely tribe: How to measure the success of your blog/website. It’s especially important now, as we head into the last week of the #customerlove challenge.

And when you see the results, you will love your customers even more.

How can you do this? By analyzing your blog traffic using Web Analytics – more precisely, a tool called Google Analytics.

Analyzing your blog traffic might sound scary at first, but once you dive in into this wonderful world of insights (not numbers – insights) everything becomes darn easy.

So, let’s dive into it.

1. Check Bounce Rates

The Bounce Rate represents the percentage of your visitors who come to your site and exit immediately, within 10 seconds or without seeing other pages on your blog.

That is why it’s good to check the Bounce Rate for the traffic you receive from search engines (specific keywords), different websites where you have links, but also for pages/posts of your blog.

Doing this will help you see:

• What keywords your SEO campaigns should focus on
• What are the most valuable websites that send you visitors
• What pages/posts are most read on your website

To do this, check the [Bounce Rate] column in your Google Analytics reports for keywords ([Traffic Sources] > [Keywords]), referring sites ([Traffic Sources] > [Referring Sites]) and pages from your blog/website ([Content] > [Top Content]).

If you are not familiar with them, these are sections from your Google Analytics account. Don’t have one? Then scroll down and check your task for today.

2. Check Keywords

The [Keywords] report from [Traffic Sources] displays information about the keywords used by your visitors in search engines to reach your website. It is helpful because it can help you measure and improve your search engine optimization campaign.

For example, if you see that one particular keyword is giving you some traffic, check your rankings for it and see if you can improve it. You can go to your post/page and try to do some tweaks:

• If it’s a keyword that represents your post/page, add it to the title.
• Try to add the keyword on multiple sections of your post/page, but don’t overdo it.
• Get some links to that post/page from friends or guest posts using that keyword as anchor text.

To do this, just go to the [Keywords] report in [Traffic Sources], check your keywords and tweak your post/page.

From this example, you can see that I might look into optimizing my Scribe SEO review, which is on my To Do list.

3. Compare Data

Use the [Compare to Past] feature of Google Analytics to compare two different dates of data and see how your website performed during those periods.

But be careful to compare the same days of the week. So, if your period starts with Monday, then make sure the previous period starts with Monday, too.

Now, select a week or month in your account and see how the website performed compared with the previous period.

This way you will see what’s performing well and what’s not.

4. Check your Visitors’ Loyalty

Probably the most important metrics that you can measure for your blog are the ones under the [Visitors] > [Visitors Loyalty] report: Loyalty, Recency, Length of Visit and Depth of Visit.

They can help you check:

• How many times visitors move to your blog
• How often visitors come to your blog
• How much time they spend on your blog
• How deep they go when reading your blog

So, go now and check how visitors engage on your website.

5. Don’t Look Too Much at Overviews and Averages

Yes, it’s good to look at averages, but only if you want to get at-a-glance views about your website or check different metrics.

Instead, dive in into your data, check traffic for particular pages, see what keywords are performing better, what are the best referring sites, and how your website performs towards your goals.

Now, look at the tips I mentioned before and try to figure out where you get potential customers, what content are your visitors value most, and what you can change to engage your visitors more.

So what I would suggest you do for today?

1. If you don’t have one already, get yourself a Google Analytics account.
2. Subscribe to my course Google Analytics – From Zero to Analysis Ninja, because I am covering #1 in my second lesson. [Plus it’s free!]
3. Share your experience, thoughts, ideas with us in the comments section below.