Are You Analyzing the Success of Your Blog Posts?
Once you publish a blog post and share it with your social media followers, in your email newsletter, and throughout other distribution channels, don’t you dare think that the work is over. Just as important as writing and sharing great blog posts is analyzing the success of those blog posts. After all, what’s the point of spending the time writing a blog post and sharing it if the topic isn’t resonating with your target audience?
Here are a few basic tips and places to look in order to analyze the success of your blog posts:
Short-term traffic
If you don’t yet have Google Analytics set up on your website, that’s the first step. Once that’s up and running you’ll be able to see the traffic coming to your blog posts. What does it look like over the short term? You might see a spike and then notice that it drops off. That’s to be expected since you did an initial promotional push via social media, the newsletter, etc. How does the short-term traffic compare to that of other posts?
Long-term traffic
It’s certainly OK, and recommended, to re-promote an “older” blog post again through your promotional channels. Likely that will give it a quick boost in traffic. However, what you want to look at over time is whether the post is delivering any organic search traffic. This is going to take some time to achieve, so it’s not a metric to look at right away.
Bounce rate
This is another data point that Google Analytics will provide. Once someone lands on the post- how long are they staying on the page? If people aren’t lasting more than a few seconds, that’s not the best sign since it typically takes longer than that to browse a blog post. A short time on page can mean that the content wasn’t living up to the expectations established from the title of the post. Lots of traffic but quick bounces means the topic might be on point but the content/style needs to be reworked.
Social interaction
What kind of attention is the post getting in social media? You’ll be able to see social referral traffic in Analytics, but you’ll also want to look at shares, likes, re-tweets, comments, etc. What are people saying about it? Comments make a great source for future topics!
Depending on the organizational structure of your company and marketing department, the person doing the writing might not be responsible for looking at results. That’s OK as long as there is communication between these two parties. The writers should be receiving insights and feedback from the people that analyze results in order to improve their work.
Categorized in: Content Marketing
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