Important Blog Metrics and How to Use Them to Increase Traffic

Blogging is a vital part of your marketing strategy and allows you to share valuable information with your audience, educate them, and establish relationships. Although you may already have included a blog on your website, it might not yet have driven the expected results, and you may wonder how to fine-tune your content marketing strategy. The metrics below are essential to evaluate the success of your blog and increase traffic to your articles, so more people learn about your products and services and more website visitors convert to your customers.

Pageviews

It goes without saying that traffic is amongst the primary factors that determine the success of your content marketing strategy. Therefore, pageviews – the metric measuring the number of views for a particular page on your website is amongst the crucial metrics you should consider when analyzing your blog’s success. Per Google, a pageview is a view of a page on your site tracked by the Analytics tracking code.

To monitor Pageviews, you can use Google’s page views tracking tool. There is no single number that is good to have when it comes to page views, and it depends on numerous factors, including your audience, goals, reputation, etc. Nevertheless, pages should have a steady increase in page views over time.

Traffic by Channel

Although you might see the desired number of visitors, it’s equally important to understand their source. For example, some may come to your blog from a Google search, while others find your article on social media or paid ads. Understanding the path your blog readers are taking is essential to see how your marketing efforts are working, so you can adjust them accordingly based on each channel and increase traffic over time. Google Analytics allows you to filter your page view data by channel, so you see the source of your blog traffic.

Bounce Rate

Even if users visit your blog post, not all will find it relevant or useful and go back to the search results without spending significant time on your site and interacting with other pages. The percentage of users abandoning a website is called the bounce rate. A bounce is a session that triggers only a single request to the Analytics server, such as opening a single web page and leaving the site without interacting with other pages.

You can track the bounce rate through Google Analytics and see the Bounce rate on a web page and the bounce rate of a website. Knowing how many people leave a website is essential, but a high bounce rate doesn’t always indicate your content isn’t helpful.

For example, you are reading this article because you want to learn more about crucial blog metrics and how they can help you increase traffic. After reading this, you might go back to the search engine, and it won’t necessarily mean you didn’t like the article. Therefore, the bounce rate can sometimes be misleading. In the case of blogs, many of your visitors might go back to the search engine, and it’s normal to have a high bounce rate. However, if you include CTA at the bottom of your page to visit your store, read another article, or interact with other pages and still have a high bounce rate, it means your CTA isn’t working as intended.

Average Time on Page

When the bounce rate doesn’t tell the whole story, Average Time on Page can help you understand if your blogs are beneficial to readers. This metric indicates the time blog visitors spend on each page. If you stayed on this page for only 10 seconds, most probably you found it irrelevant. If most visitors remained on this page for less than a minute, it’ll indicate the blog post needs fine-tuning because, for an average reader, it’d take at least 3 minutes to read this article! Even if many users visit your blog, your content isn’t driving the results if readers don’t stay on the page long enough to read it.

This metric can help identify if your blog pages are resonating with your audience. Then, when they aren’t spending enough time on the page, you can polish the articles by adding visual elements and breaking up the text with headings, subheadings, tables, bullet points, so they’re easy to read. Gifs, graphics, images, videos all can put the cherry on top of your blog posts.

Page Speed

Even though page speed might seem somewhat irrelevant to your content, and you might think there’s no going back once users find a valuable piece of information, it’s one of the primary factors users abandon web pages. The internet is full of helpful information, and nobody wants to sit around waiting for your page to load in their browsers. Besides, Page Speed is one of the few confirmed ranking factors by Google, so a slow-loading page will not rank well in queries essential for traffic. The percentage of users abandoning a website rises if it takes more than three seconds to load. Google Analytics provides website owners with data regarding Page Speed and recommendations on improving it.

Click-Through Rate

Although many people may visit and read your article, you suddenly become a non-profit publisher if nobody takes action. In reality, you are a business owner who needs to find a way to increase profit. Besides aiming to educate readers, nearly every blog post aims to inspire the action of users. Many blogs include CTA at the end to promote gated content such as your online inventory or other blog articles. Your click-through rate indicates how many readers are clicking on your CTA.

Conversions

Conversions are also crucial as they show which blog readers complete an online or offline activity that is crucial to your business, like a completed sign-up for your email campaign or a completed purchase, also called an eCommerce conversion. This metric indicates how many new leads your blog post is generating. Conversions can be any action you encourage on your blog, like watching a video or downloading an e-book.

SERP Rankings

Finally, Google SERP rankings are crucial for driving more traffic to your website. This is because 93% of experiences online start with Google, where people type keywords and phrases in the search engine to find relevant information. Google returns a list of relevant pages to users, and if your page ranks on the second page of the query, you already have 75% fewer chances to acquire readers from the search. One of the tools you can use to analyze your SERP Rankings in Google Rank Checker is Keyword SERP Rankings Tool, which lets you easily extract Google results against any keyword and categorize them according to different categories. Like with any other marketing type, content marketing requires a well-thought strategy and time to see results. We hope the metrics above will help you increase traffic to your blog and engage more readers with your content. Although we have covered the essential metrics for your blog’s success, content marketing requires a set of tactics to bring expected outcomes. If you think you need a deep dive into content marketing, feel free to reach out to Internet Marketing Geeks today with your questions or to schedule your new client consultation, and we can get started on your custom marketing plan right away.