Using Analytics to Increase Your Site Engagement
{ By Emily O’Connell, Editorial Coordinator }
As a business owner, a blog can be a critical component of your marketing strategy; it’s the vehicle for driving traffic and converting leads and establishing authority and trust. How do you know if your marketing strategy is working though? With all content and leads you’re generating, there is a goldmine of data that needs to be uncovered: i.e. analytics.
Hubspot identifies analytics as, “the act of analyzing data to gain valuable insights. Blog analytics is doing this in the context of a blog to measure and analyze post traffic, reader engagement, conversions, and more.” Analytics can heavily influence your decision on what’s working, what’s not working and why, especially when a key stakeholder wants to know how the blog is contributing to higher goals in the company. By analyzing blog data, you will be able to gain a pulse on search presence, traffic performance, readership engagement, lead generation and authority into your online niche.
A few individual metrics you should consider include organic search impressions. This means the amount of times your page has been seen in the SERP (Search Engine Results Page). The higher your blog ranks in the SERP, the more visibility, and as a result, traffic, your blog will earn through organic search.
It’s great to be present in the SERPs but your content must also be engaging to compel the user to click. The more organic clicks your content earns, the more traffic you’ll receive. However, if you find that your clicks are low, the first thing you want to check are your impressions – if your impressions are low too, you have to work on increasing your impressions. Impressions count each time your content appears on a page. If impressions are high and clicks are low, it could mean that the headline needs an adjustment to earn more clicks.
It is impossible to talk about site analytics without also talking about site visits. A visit measures the amount of times your website was seen by a user. A page view, however, refers to the number of times a page was seen by a user. So, if you are managing a blog with multiple pages, you might note that your page views can be significantly higher and can have multiple page views for a single visit, since a user can visit more than one page during a session.
While there are many other metrics to identify and consider, the top metrics will help you identify:
- Whether or not blog traffic is trending up or down
- Average number of page views per visit
- Average views per post
- (and more)
I hope that you are curious about analytics and implementing it into your business. It’s very helpful and will save you time and money down the road when it comes to goal setting and converting!
