Beyond basic web analytics, you want to measure how engaged the readers of your blog are. This means finding out the number of readers subscribe to your blog's feed, the number of click through to links on your main website, and just how many bother to leave comments on your articles. You're also interested in the comments, themselves, obviously, which is a bit more subjective analysis. All this means you need to become looking at the following new metrics:
This is a simple and important number to track. Readers who subscribe to your blog's feed obviously think it is important enough for them to do so. The more subscribers you've, the more you're doing something right something that's necessary to those subscribers. You can track subscriptions using FeedBurner along with other feed services; it's not really a metric tracked by traditional web analytics tools.
You know you're doing something right when other blogs start linking to your posts. A post with a large number of inbound links has a perceived level of authority that a less lined-to post does not. For this reason, you need to track backlinks and achieve this for each of your posts individually.
When you want to increase the interaction with your customer base, the best way to measure this is via the comments left on your blog posts. A post that has a large number of comments has obviously touched a nerve with your customers. They read the article and were involved enough to spend the time to leave their comments.
That's the best thing. So you should definitely measure the quantity of comments for each blog post but don't stop there. These comments are an invaluable source of feedback from your most-interested comments, which means you need to read them and digest what your customers are saying. Ignore comments at your peril; they are able to help you not only fine-tune your blog posting, but also improve your business.
Don't forget that your blog is a means to an end, and that end involves driving customers to your main website to make a purchase, request more information, or whatever.
To that end, you need to trace the number of click-throughs from the blog itself and from each blog post to a page on your website. Track the amount of click throughs, as well as which pages are clicked to. Which blog posts are driving the most business to your site, and which, while perhaps interesting, aren't helping your business that much? Fundamental essentials questions you want to answer.
The point with these blog-specific metrics would be to determine which posts would be best engaging your readers and therefore driving the most traffic back to your main web pages. That means comparing these metrics for each post on your blog to find out which posts will work the best.
For instance, if you work for a car dealership and discover that posts about auto repair perform better than posts about used cars, you should write more auto repair posts and fewer about used cars. Now, this may cause some consternation in management ranks, particularly if the management really, really wants to push car or truck sales. But when your readers don't respond well to that kind of content, you have to listen to and respect their wishes, management wishes be damned.
That's one from the unique aspects of blog marketing and all sorts of social media marketing, for that matter: The ongoing conversation with your customers determines what you write about and promote. It will also tell you what your customers are interested in and therefore can help shape the direction of your business. If you find that customers are interested in something apart from what you're focusing on…well, that argues for any shift in overall business strategy, doesn't it?
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