Creating high-quality blogs is just one piece of the content marketing puzzle. You should also back up well-written prose with a data and analytics appraisal. This will help you to measure the success of your blog campaigns. Here are a few key performance indicators to keep track of.
Sessions
Measuring the overall traffic to a blog hub will give you a clear overview of how it is performing. You can do this by tracking the number of sessions over a certain period of time. When a single user spends time on your website, this will count as a session. You can compare the figure for each month to see whether your blog is becoming more popular and identify key trends. For example, certain topics may deliver a higher amount of sessions.
Pageviews
That example lends itself to the pageviews metric. This is a simple stat that shows how many times a blog post has been viewed. When using Google Analytics, navigate to “Behaviour” and then “Site Content” and “All Pages” to access this metric. You can use pageviews as a jumping-off point for more in-depth research. It may be useful to find out if your best-performing blog has a greater percentage of organic search traffic compared to the rest. This data can then inform your SEO as well as your content marketing strategies.
Average time on page
The quality of engagement is often a more relevant indicator for your content, so keep an eye on how long users are spending on your webpages. If page time is particularly low for a blog, it may be due to a clickbait headline, a preview that did not match their expectations, or simply that the content did not reach a required standard. From here, compare the article with others by content length, number of subheadlines, images used and formatting. This could shine a light on why content may or may not be resonating with audiences.
New vs returning
The “Audience” section in Google Analytics will also offer data on the number of new users that are reading your content compared to those that have stopped by before. The new vs returning metric is very useful for finding out exactly whether you are building a loyal audience.
