The 7 Most Important Metrics for Bloggers
Feed subscribers
Google now owns the single most accurate metric for measuring the size of blogs. Feedburner feed subscribers count has become a hard currency in valuing blogs and determining how reputable they are. I’ve been guilty in the past of subscribing to a blog on the basis that if thousands of other people do the content must be worth it.
Use the graph in your Feedburner dashboard as well as tools such as this one to examine your stats more deeply. Is there an upward trend? Are you happy with the rate you are attracting new readers?
Page views per visitor
User engagement and the number of pages viewed per visitor are extremely important statistics. If all your readers are leaving within 30 seconds and only viewing 1 or 2 pages per visit it shows that your content could do with expanding. Some blogs naturally have longer visitor sessions than others s try to take a look at the stats of some other blogs in your niche to see how yours compares.
Unique visitors per day
My favourite statistic is the number of unique visitors per day a site is getting, usually this is fairly static for normal sites but for blogs it can vary from 500 one day to 50,000 the next. Look at the stats for days without big peaks from social media and try to spot any underlying trends to the data. Ideally you should see growth every month, excluding large social media spikes.
Referrals from Google per day
Looking at the number of people finding your site through Google each day is the best way to track your SEO efforts. Check to see how the trend changes over time and drill down to specific keywords whenever you see a spike or drop in traffic. Any significant decline is probably due to Google losing trust in your site and is a sure sign that you should make sure you are adhering to the webmaster guidelines and building high quality trusted links.
Backlinks according to Yahoo
All sites should see a steady increase in the number of people linking to them as they age and their reach grows. Watch how the number of links shoots up whenever you carry out some aggressive marketing and check that your link profile contains as many high quality editorially granted links as possible.
Technorati authority and ranking
Technorati is the most accurate method of tracking which blogs have been writing about you in the last 6 months. Make sure your ranking is always getting better and that your recent reactions page is full of real blogs making real comments about you.
Average number of comments per blog post
Some low quality blogs get lots of comments whereas others of exceptional quality get very few so this is somewhat of a difficult area. However, in general, if you are getting more comments on your recent posts compared to a few months ago that is a good thing. Plot a graph of the number of comments your posts have got and see what it looks like, be careful of the data as some old posts with good search engine rankings might have a lot of comments to skew the data.
There’s an eighth one I try to track quite regularly; the amount of referrals from other websites per day and/ or the amount of referring websites per day. Technorati doesn’t show all referring websites and it also doesn’t tell me how many referrers a specific website has been sending me
Comment by Wiep — January 10, 2008 @ 2:10 pm
Thx for the link, you might also want to check out my Blog metrics WordPress plugin!
Comment by Joost de Valk — January 10, 2008 @ 3:34 pm
These meteric are OK, but what about the real life ones. Most blogs surely have more real life metricsthat need to be considered, such as monetization or increase in reputation etc
Comment by SEO Blog - Gary — January 11, 2008 @ 2:38 pm
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Comment by Caine Dean — January 12, 2008 @ 8:26 am
That’s a good list, applicable to many blogs. But I made many tens of thousands of dollars last year blogging without paying much attention to them or, I think, doing well on them. The revenue source was the customers attracted for the revenue-generating parts of my business. The reason for the success was twofold:
A. Perceived quality of my industry analysis.
B. Perceived status as a recognized industry authority.
How can one be a valued authority without high readership? By writing in an area with a small, high-value audience. In my case, that’s the enterprise IT that Robert Scoble famously said was un-cool.
All that said — one goal for this year is to extend my audience reach, and I’ll be using metrics very much like the ones you suggest.
Comment by Curt Monash — January 15, 2008 @ 2:03 am
pretty decent list to improve blogs and other SEO factors
Comment by SEO Solutions — January 15, 2008 @ 8:43 pm
Thanks pal. you have made some good points but can you please indicate what tools needed to record analytics, especially number of comments and technorati submissions over time?
Comment by Attique — January 22, 2008 @ 1:09 pm
Nice metrics, then a blog should involve your readers. Let them have a relationship with you, contributing value that is ability to create conversation.
Comment by Biodun — January 25, 2008 @ 9:22 am
I, myself, use Google Analytics (google.com/analytics) and it is a great web-metrics service.
It is really complete and lets you analyze traffic data from many angles. I highly recommend
Google Analytics…good article…kudos!!
Comment by Keith — January 31, 2008 @ 4:01 pm
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