Have you recently started a blog and want to know how your blog is performing?
This article will be helpful for you.
I'll show you the metrics to analyse your blog.
I assume you have a blog for this article connected to Google Analytics and Google Search Console. Read this to link your blog to Google Analytics and this article to connect your blog to Google Search Console.
Let's start.
1. Traffic
What Is Traffic?
In short, traffic is the number of people that visit your blog. You get traffic daily, weekly, monthly and annually.
There are different types of traffic:
Organic traffic: traffic which comes directly from the search engines.
Direct traffic: traffic you get from people who type the URL of your blog.
Social traffic: traffic you get from social media platforms to your blog.
Referral traffic: traffic that comes from another site which links to your blog. In short, when your readers are on a website related to your blog.
Email traffic: traffic from your email if you have an active newsletter.
Follow these steps if you want to see this on Google Analytics:
Click on the tab Audience.
Click on the tab Lifetime Value.
On your right, you should see a panel like this:
If you want more details about your traffic, click on the Acquisition channel drop-down list.
Acquisition source gives you more detailed information on where the traffic comes from. For example, Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, etc.
Acquisition medium gives your more detailed information on the traffic source of your blog. For example, how much of your traffic comes from organic search, referral, email, etc.
Acquisition campaign measures how the users arrive at your blog. This tab is more suitable for those who run marketing campaigns.
Google Analytics offers another way to measure your blog's traffic.
Under the Audience tab, there is another one called Acquisition.
Click on All Traffic.
Then click on Channels.
This metric is interesting because it tells you which acquisition channel you want your blog to perform better. For example, let's say you have an active newsletter and send a new email every Monday to your readers.
You will want to track this traffic from Email to know whether your newsletter is performing well enough.
Related: How To Increase Your Blog's Traffic in 3 Easy Steps
2. Behaviour
This metric gives your information on which articles get you more clicks, etc.
Follow these steps:
Select Behaviour.
Site Content.
All Pages.
This tab is handy because:
It tells you which one of your articles is the most successful.
It tells you which one of your articles is the least successful.
Note that the column Pageviews includes repeated views on a single article. So, if someone sees one of your articles more than once, Google Analytics counts that too.
3. Visitors
Visitors, in short, are your audience.
We can divide visitors into:
Returning visitors: visitors who have visited your site more than once within the past two years.
New visitors: visitors who are new to your website.
You can find this metric by following these steps:
Select Audience.
Overview.
On the right, you should see a pie chart like this:
If people are spending a lot of time reading your blog posts, that’s a great sign that you’ve created a quality piece of content. But another sign that your content is valuable and high quality are that people are referencing your blog posts multiple times. Returning visitors gives you that data.[Databox]
Related: 6 Easy Steps to Get Your First 10K Monthly Visitors
Site performance is a metric that I've neglected, but I think it's essential to know because you want your blog to be easily accessible and the load time to be as quick as possible.
Imagine: would you like it if you want to read an article, but the website takes too much time to load? Also, is your website easy to navigate across all devices?
We can use Google Search Console for this one.
Google Search Console is a powerful tool because it lets you see how your content performs.
This is the overview of Google Search Console:
If you click on Search Console, the site redirects you to a page where you can find the Most searched queries and Most trending queries.
Google Search Console also gives you a full report of your blog.
This report includes:
- Search type: Web, Image, Video, News.
- Total clicks, Total impressions, Average Click-through Rate (CTR), and Average Position.
Both Google Analytics and Google Search Console send you a monthly report via email containing top performance metrics, such as Users, Sessions. This report compares the current month's blog's performance with the previous month, giving you a good idea of how your blog performs month by month.
5. Personal Messages
Personal messages are my favourite way to know if a blog is successful.
It's a beautiful feeling waking up in the morning and reading messages from people who say they enjoy reading your content. It's such a rewarding feeling. In the end, a blog is all about helping people.
Related: 13 Best Reasons Why Developers Should Blog
Conclusion
I hope you've found this article helpful.
Which metric do you think is the most important? Let me know in the comments.
Until next time! 🙋🏾♀️
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