Measuring the success of your blog [BT broadband office]

Measuring the success of your blog

Posted 22 December 2006 at 4:42PM by Alexa Williamson in Business blogging

We've talked about why a blog can be an excellent communication tool for a business. But, measuring its effectiveness is also very important.

Statistics worth looking at

One of the first things you'll want to look at is your site statistics. A decent web analytics package should be able to tell you:

page views for the blog as a whole
page views on individual posts
the ranking of your blog pages in comparison to your other website pages
the number of unique visitors to your blog
the number of searches on your website for your blog
where traffic is coming from from outside sources to your blog
the keywords people are using to search for your blog

If you don't have your own web analytics software, Google Analytics is a free alternative.

Free external sources of statistics for your blog

You can also measure the success of your blog through blog search engines such as Technorati or Google Blog Search.

When you type the name of your blog into Technorati, you can find out your 'ranking' on Technorati, how many other blogs are linking to you and how many people have selected your blog as one of their 'favorites'.

Alexa.com is also worth trying. It'll tell you how much traffic you're getting from people who search for websites using the Alexa toolbar. You can also plot your results against those of your competitors.

Other metrics

Other statistics worth reviewing include the number of people who have signed up to receive your blog's RSS feed and the number of comments or 'trackbacks' your receive against each post you write.

If your blog is intended to lead to sales, take a look at your sales conversions. Work out how many people visit the blog divided by how many sales your blog generates. Typically, you're doing well if you are getting a conversion rate of 2.5% or higher.

After setting your metrics and looking at your statistics, you can then compare the results to other forms of communication you use to promote your business.

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Comments

1. At December 23, 2006 4:07 PM, John Sage wrote:

Very informative. Never heard of Alexa.com before. Do you have an invested interest?

2. At December 24, 2006 5:54 PM, Alexa Williamson wrote:

Thanks John! Glad you find the article useful. Re invested interest in Alexa.com - no! It's only coincidence that Alexa.com has the same name as me. Perhaps I am subconsciously the namesake as I was around before it was!

; )

BT broadband office