As useful as a blog can be for your business, those gains won’t come unless you fully commit the time and resources required to make it successful.
Nobody has ever seen improvement from spending only five minutes a day in the gym.
But how can you tell if your blog is improving or having any effect on your business?
To determine the success and progress of your efforts, look to the data. Here are some of the blog metrics you should track on a monthly basis to make sure your content strategy is moving in the right direction:
Overall Visits
This metric follows how many visits your blog gets overall, per month or any given period.
If you consistently track over a certain period, you can determine if you’re gaining visitors or if you have plateaued. It’s a quick pulse check to understand if your content is getting stale for your audience. By tracking total visits, you can also collect beneficial monthly/seasonal trends.
Keep in mind that a decrease in traffic isn’t always a bad thing – you can experience a reduction and attract the ‘right visitors’ to your blog.
Traffic Sources
How do people get to your blog? It’s useful to know.
If you have a lot of social referral traffic, you can spend extra time to make certain that you’re promoting top-notch content on social media. In the same vein, if your organic traffic is low, you can devote more energies to improving your search engine optimization (SEO) efforts across the board.
Top Viewed Posts
Knowing which posts have done the best for you is incredibly valuable.
In most blog analytic tools, you can segment this metric by author, topic, and format to further drill into what factors affect your top views. For example, if readers show interest in a particular subject or category, you can shape your content strategy around what they’re looking to learn more about.
Social Shares
Generally speaking, people only share the things they find valuable or interesting.
When your articles get shared by visitors, it’s a positive indicator that you’re doing something right. As an added plus, any time someone shares your blog posts, that content is pushed to a brand new audience.
Social shares by themselves aren’t a particularly strong metric, but keeping track of shares by post or channel can help you narrow down which content you should prioritize.
That’s it for our overview of the top four blog metrics you should always track! Did we miss any essential blog metrics? Drop us a line or leave a comment below!
Editor’s Note: This post was initially published in October 2015 and has been updated for clarity and accuracy.