Metric's Guide to Analytics and Reporting - Chapter 4

Chapter 4

Measuring a Blog

Measuring your business blog is a powerful strategy that can identify opportunities for optimization.

If your goals for your business blog are to generate leads, being able to identify the differences between content that converts and content that doesn’t will allow you to tailor your approach moving forward.

Sessions

A session is a group of interactions (page views, events, social interactions, conversions, transactions) that take place on your site within a given time frame.

It’s important to understand how sessions are defined to know what you’re measuring. A single user can open multiple sessions on the same day, or over several days, weeks or months.

Sessions end based on:

• Time-based expiration (after 30 minutes of inactivity or after midnight)
• Campaign change (user who arrives via one campaign leaves and returns via a new campaign would qualify as having two sessions)

Pages per session

Pages per session, also called average page depth, refers to average number of pages viewed by a single user per session.

Page views

Page Views refer to the total amount of times a user lands on a specific page per session.

Note: Unique page views refers to the amount of times a specific page was viewed at least once per session.

Post bounce rate

Bounce Rate is the percentage of single-page sessions i.e. sessions where a user arrives on your site and then leaves immediately without any interactions, conversions, etc.

Bounces occur for a wide range of reasons. Users may find all the information they needed on that first page, they could have been distracted and stopped browsing all or a sudden or they could be taking one look at your site and wanting to leave.

Analytics platforms allow you to track the bounce rates for both your website as a whole, and individual pages. This can allow you to identify specific areas of your site that are potentially confusing or frustrating your users into leaving your site altogether.

Conversion rate (Leads)

To understand the relationship between traffic, leads and customers on your business blog, there are two types of conversion rates that you should be tracking: visit-to-lead and lead-to customer.

Visit-to-lead Rate refers to the rate at which your blog converts visitors into leads. To calculate your visit-to-lead rate, divide the number of unique leads by the number of visitors (unique sessions) during a given reporting period and multiply by 100.

Lead-to-customer rate refers to the rate at which you are converting leads gathered on your blog into customers. To calculate your lead-to-customer, divide the number of converted customers received from interaction with your blog by the total number of blog leads during a given reporting period and multiply by 100.

These metrics are powerful tools for evaluating room for improvement on your blog.

For example:

• A low visit-to-lead rate might identify that you need to refine the types of demographics you are targeting or dedicate more time to improving the quality of your blog content.
• A high lead-to-customer rate might identify a need to focus on generating more traffic.

Tracking these how these metrics change over time will provide you with insight into how your blogging strategies and tactics are influencing your ability to convert users into customers.

Lead source

Definition: Refers to the breakdown of leads generated on your blog by the sources from which they came.

Some sources might be big traffic generators but have a low conversion rate. You need to be able to identify results like this to be able to address that disparity and increase the conversion rate of your higher traffic sources.

Understanding where your most valuable traffic (i.e. users that convert as leads) are coming from can provide direction for how to optimize your lead generation tactics.

Top lead generation posts

By identifying which posts convert visitors at a higher rate, you can identify which content (topics, format, imagery, style, tone) represent the most value to your business, and as a result, which aspects should be incorporated into your content strategy.