Started a blog to have a platform to present your opinion and thoughts?
Discovered it’s not as simple as that?
As a writer, your main job is to create content, but unfortunately, it’s not limited to that. Other than pondering on the ideas for creating content, you also need to spend time in knowing how well your content is doing. That is where analytics comes into the picture.
Analytics is checking whether every ounce of that blood-sweat you have put in has paid off or not. The blog may be a source of income for many of us, hence, its performance measurement is vital. Blog performance evaluation can portray options in which you can monetize your blog.
But are you scared of numbers and statistics?
Multiple analytics tools help you assess your blog’s overall performance. Knowing data for customer engagements, landing pages, lead generation, etc. aids you in decision making to improvise or to fuel future growth.
Surrounded by the intense competition in the blogging space, acing the analytics can give you a clear edge over others.
Analytics is defined as:
● Collecting the various type of data based on the blog
● Discovering patterns and data’s relevance through tools and statistical formulas
● Drawing conclusions and developing strategies through the evaluation
Relevance of Analytics
Developing the blog and growing your viewer base are two of the main and most common goals of the bloggers. Analytics tools help you in achieving that. Through analytics, you can check the things that work the best for the blog and things that tend to create an obstacle. Knowing this, it gets easier for you to mend the parts that are not working and optimize the best resulting areas to attain more success.
The analytics tools ease your understanding of complicated data by illustrating charts, statistics, and metrics. With this in hand, it becomes convenient to know more about how to create suitable content, a better understanding of the types of readers, number of views and time spent by readers on the blog, etc. See which topics drive the most traffic and through analytics, you can improve your SEO performance. To get better understanding, analytics can help you compare
the blog trends and activities with the precious period. Precision received through data analytics can result in actional and scalable strategies to maximize business performance.
How to Use Analytics
Raw data can prove to be scary. Before you look at the numbers, decide on what you want to measure. List down the insights that you want to derive from the data. Being data literate is crucial, know that each data holds its importance. Select an analysis tool on the basis of the contents that you have figured out to measure. Each tool offers a variety of different features.
Listed below are some of the most recommended and popular features to measure for bloggers.
1. Views/Traffic
Measure the popularity of your blog through this. Check the traction over time. Know how many visits you have received on a periodic basis. See whether you are gaining the highest readers for a particular topic, weekday, time of the day.
Certain topics not giving most views are not too relevant to the audience, considering reducing the number of posts on the same. Try creating more content around the topic of the posts that gain the most engagement. Identify a pattern to pick on the cues for content generation.
2. Referral Sources
Know where your readers are coming from. See your blog’s referral sources to know from where people are getting to know about you. The traffic received can be through different channels and not direct. Figure out the blog visits per referral channel. Referral channels can be email, web landing page, social media, etc. Through this, you can know from which channel you receive most viewers, and decide on promotional strategies.
Keep tracking to know the ROI on the promotions. Keep a track of the keywords used by your viewers to search for the blog on search engines, and check your ranking on search engines.
3. Reader Behavior
Using the internet as a medium, readers come from various places and backgrounds. Their behavior/reaction towards your content may reflect the country or culture they belong to. You get to know whether the kind of readers you want are coming to your website or not. Try including local content.
See if the visitors are interacting with your blog or not. If the engagement level is low, try to figure out more techniques. Also, notice the time reader is spending on each article. At what point do they leave the article. The higher the time spent reveals their interest in the content published.
Count if the readers are revisiting your blog. This shows their interest in your content and helps you know how many readers are interested in establishing long-term relations. Measure the likes, followers, shares, etc. See the people linking you or mentioning you.
Social media has a wide reach these days. Evaluate the comments. Comments are a great way to gauge the reader’s reaction to your content. It also reveals the level of engagement.
There are a lot of other features available. Select the best tool and make the efficient usage of the same. With plenty of options available online, you certainly face difficulties in selecting one tool. Data generated is too valuable for the business with the kind of insights it can provide.
A few recommended tools are:
1. Google Analytics
Google Analytics – the one-stop destination for everything related to data analytics. This is your go-to tool if increasing web traffic is your main goal, as Google Analytics tracks and reports your site’s web activities and collects information related to visitors like pageviews, average time, bounce rate, page value, source of traffic, highest viewed page, SEO and ranking, audience report, social media report, etc.
Pros
● Real-time analytics, lets you view the insights on visitors currently on the website.
● Can be integrated with other tools like Google Ads, Google Search Console, etc.
● The insights can be exported to excel.
● Helps you track campaigns and rank your pages on the basis of popularity.
● Can be used across multiple devices and is free.
Cons
● A lot of ad-filtering programs and extensions can block Google Analytics’ tracking code, therefore preventing the data from being collected.
● Privacy networks can hide the actual location of a visitor and present inaccurate geographical data.
● Data can not be collected from those uses who do not enable or delete Google Analytics cookies leading to loss of data.
● Uses the sampling method in the generation of many of its reports, randomly selected samples might not represent the whole data accurately.
● Sometimes it gets complex to use and understand.
2. Google Search Console
Google Search Console helps you optimize your website’s visibility in search engines. It basically helps you understand how Google search views your site and lets you optimize the site’s organic presence. It gives you valuable insights into your website and its visitors through data like the period traffic to your site, landing pages, devices used to visit the website, the medium through which the viewer is getting to know about your site, etc.
Google Search Console provides reports, tools, and learning resources to get your content on Google Search. Also provides technical details about the website that helps you deal with its rankings or impressions.
Pros
● You can identify and fix errors on your site.
● You can submit the sitemap directly and get it crawled.
● Provides technical SEO feedback including specific keyword performance data.
● Easier to identify the bad links.
Cons
● Provides the HTML errors while crawling, however the feature is not up to date. Also presents the previously fixed errors as errors.
● Gets difficult to understand the technical issues, as it requires in-depth knowledge to understand.
3. Leadfeeder
Leadfeeder reveals the behaviour of the viewers and tracks their whole journey. You can track the full browsing history of a client to understand their interests. Also have multiple filter options for your leads on the basis of various criteria like their location, browsing behaviour, etc. Also allows customization for feeds for your prospects.
Pros
● Can be connected to a LinkedIn account for an easier approach to prospect.
● Leads are automatically prioritized on the basis of their importance.
● Can be integrated with your CRM suite for sending the new leads to salespeople.
● Notifies you when a target client visits your website.
Cons
● The premium features are paid and to get full access you have to select a price based plan.
● The data can be confusing as quality leads are not separated and following on all the visitors is time consuming.
● Filtering out categories per your preference can prove to be a challenge.
It’s time to make smart data-driven decisions. With having such a valuable commodity, you have access to insights that your competitors lack. Leverage on this opportunity and make actionable strategies.
A lot of your problems revolving around content creation can be solved through analytics including improvising and future ideas. Respect the data you have, a resource that brings you an added advantage.
Some other famous blogs which you can read about Digital Marketing and Analytics:
Hopefully, with this article, we have helped you sail through the journey of acing the analytics.
