Key Performance Indicators Every Blogger Should Be Monitoring
Key performance indicators, or KPIs, give you a great insight into how your blog is performing and whether you’re on track to achieve your goals. Whatever topics you cover or whoever your target audience is, you can monitor your success by scrutinizing your performance in relation to KPIs.
However, KPIs are most effective when you’re using the right ones! There are endless metrics that can be used as key performance indicators, but they don’t all carry the same worth.
To find out how to monitor your performance more effective, take a look at the KPIs you should be focusing on:
1. Blog Visits
First and foremost, you’ll want to know exactly how many users are visiting your blog in a given timeframe. Your daily, weekly, and monthly blog visits help to determine how popular your blog is and when visits hit a peak.
When you’re measuring blog visits, be sure to check both unique and repeat visits. Every visit from a unique IP address counts as a unique visit, while repeated visits from the same IP address can indicate that loyal readers are returning to your blog multiple times.
2. Top Viewed Posts
Knowing what your readers are most interested in is critical to your long-term success and your top viewed posts can give you an insight. However, the blog posts that receive the most views can also provide useful information regarding the success of your marketing.
If you promote a particular post or subtopic via PPC, for example, and it always achieves the top spot, it could be a positive sign that your marketing efforts are successful.
3. Traffic Sources
As well as knowing how many people are viewing your posts and visiting your blog, you’ll want to know where this traffic comes from. Are users reaching your blog via search engine results, links on social media, or via PPC ads, for example?
The source of your blog traffic shows which channels are the highest performing and, conversely, which may be under-used.
Once you have this information, you’ll be able to increase the number of resources currently being used in the highest performing channels and/or refocus your efforts on the under-utilized channels you’re missing out on.
4. Lead Generation
If your blog is linked to your business or side hustle, it’s vital to know what impact it’s having on your lead generation and sales. After all, having scores of readers but no customers won’t enhance your bottom line.
A blog can be a great way to optimize your conversion rate, but don’t assume it will suddenly transform your sales figures by a significant amount. Instead, you need to new blog leads a key performance indicator and track exactly how many inquiries and sales originate as blog views.
5. Active Subscribers
Building a loyal following of readers makes it easier to market your content and it can increase the value of your blog too. Knowing how many active subscribers you have at any one time is essential, so don’t overlook this KPI.
You should be consistently gaining subscribers over time, so any dips in subscriber figures may indicate that something’s going wrong. By monitoring this KPI, you can ensure that you’re able to take action swiftly and continue to grow your readership.
Remember – there is more than one way to subscribe to a blog, so be sure to consider all options available to your readers. To find out the total number of active subscribers, for example, you may need to combine email and RSS subscribers.
Boost the Success of Your Blog
Monitoring key performance indicators is a great way to optimize your blog and boost your success. However, there are a significant number of KPIs to take into account.
By working with agencies and gaining access to professional tools, like Whatagraph, you can streamline the process and gain access to all the data you need. When KPIs and metrics are presented in an easy-to-view format, they become much more tangible and meaningful.
As a result, you’ll be more likely to incorporate them into your strategy and use them to hone your performance.
What’s more – working with a professional agency can help to put your KPIs into context. While data is useful, it needs to be analyzed if it’s going to have a meaningful impact on your performance.
When you’ve got access to specialist expertise and tools, you can minimize the number of resources you’re putting into blog management while enhancing the performance of your blog and securing more readers.