With so many analytic tools available to website owners, there really is no excuse for determining how successful your blog is. The problem for many website owners is they determine success in terms of dollars and not in conversions. Choosing the right blog metrics can help you to better identify what is and what isn't working on your blog, then make the necessary adjustments to focus on what is working. Here are the top five blog metrics you should be using to understand exactly what is working on your site.
Sharing on Social Media
When a visitor actually takes the time to share your content with their social media network, you are definitely doing something right. While it is important to have a visitor stop by your blog and read your content, sharing your information can jump start an increase in traffic to your blog. Sharing content with the right people could put your message in front of potentially millions of new visitors who want to read what you have to say.
Reader Comments
When a visitor takes the time to comment on your page, it can have a very positive ripple effect on your blog. Obviously the more comments on a page, the more you know your content is right on the money. The more comments you get actually helps your blog in several ways too. It tells other visitors that the content is engaging enough that they should take the time to see what it is all about. It also encourages others to comment and gives the original poster reason to come back and follow up to messages received by other posters. A win win for everyone.
Page Views
The first thing you must do if you haven't done so already is to install Google Analytics on your blog. This will give you detailed information on page views throughout your website. If you have a blog on anxiety disorder and you can tell from the analytics that an article about public speaking gets 100 views a day and an article about seeing the doctor gets 3 views a day, it's pretty easy to see where you should and shouldn't be focusing your efforts. Now you can look over both articles to see if there is a glaring difference as to why one receives more page views than the other or whether it is simply the subject matter.
Time Spent Viewing a Page
Similar to the page views, understanding how long a person is viewing your pages tells you a tremendous amount of information. The more time a reader is actively engaged on a page, the more likely they are reading your content and the better chance they will engage with you in the future. When a person spends a few seconds on a page, it also tells the search engine spiders information they use to rank your content. When you see long times viewing a page, you are doing something right and should duplicate your efforts.
Inbound Links
In the WordPress platform, you can track who is linking their webpages and sites to your blog posts. These inbound links are extremely valuable and help to position your website as an authority in your niche. This is one of the more powerful blog metrics that you can use to see exactly how your pages are having an impact on your visitors. If a certain page has several inbound links, people are telling you they find the information valuable enough to share it with their visitors too. That is as good as getting a referral in the business world.
