As the world turns to digital, it has become essential for a company to have an online blog. It can be a game-changing strategy and can cultivate a strong brand identity and a loyal following. However, it can be difficult to measure your blog’s performance if you’re not aware of essential digital marketing trends. So where do you start?
The Answer is KPI’s
KPI’s are key performance indicators that companies use to track how effectively they’re reaching their business objectives. It’s important to decide which KPI’s you want to monitor early on so you can check them on a regular basis. These indicators are super helpful when monitoring your blog and can point out any weaknesses or strengths your content may have.
Here are some blogging KPI’s you should definitely be tracking!
Website Visitors
Tracking your overall website visits in a given period of time is a good place to start. While you should be checking the visits regularly, don’t get carried away - monitoring this data month by month can give you a better overview of your analytics than if you monitored weekly. Keep an eye out for any trends - for example, are there specific months your numbers are really low or really high? Once you get a feel for these patterns, it becomes a lot easier and more effective to build a better content and marketing strategy.
Track your Traffic
While monitoring the amount of visitors your blog pulls in might seem enough, it’s useful to find out where your visitors are coming from. In other words, how are users discovering your blog? Here is a basic breakdown of four common sources of traffic:
Direct: Traffic from visitors who input your URL directly into their browser or arrive on your site through an unknown channel
Referral: Traffic from visitors who discover your blog by clicking on a link from another website
Organic Search: Traffic from visitors who find your blog on a search engine (not paid)
Paid Search: Traffic from visitors who have arrived on your site by clicking on a paid advertisement via a paid search platform (i.e Google AdWords)
Identifying where your traffic is coming from can you help you determine where to focus your marketing efforts. For example, if your organic search traffic is low, you should utilize more keywords in your posts to increase your SEO. On the other hand, if your organic search traffic is fairly high, you might want to use the money spent on paid search elsewhere.
If you're interested in learning more, keep an eye out for part 2! If you simply don't know where to begin, call the Bare Bones Marketing team to help you get started on achieving your marketing goals. Give us a call or email us - we are happy to answer any questions!