With more blogs transiting from a hobby to a full-blown business, it is important to know how you can have your blog KPIs to assess your performance. Whether your content marketing goal is to convert sales, get email subscriptions, or build an audience, the right KPIs will help you track your progress as a blog writer.
This post will explore three of those blogging KPIs you can use to monitor the performance of your content writing goals.
Understanding KPIs in Blogging
KPI is an acronym for Key Performance Indicator. They are metrics used to measure the progress and performance of your blogging goals at a particular point in time. A good KPI should give you insight into your overall blog performance, and its loopholes and provide possible solutions.
Just like a nursing mother, the goal of every blog owner is to grow their blogs and increase conversions. This is the reason they employ strategies like creating multiple blog posts, placing ads, optimizing their blogs, and others.
After employing these strategies, the only way to measure the performance of their blogs is through the various KPIs. This would also help them adjust their blog content strategy and make better blogging decisions.
However, you don’t need all KPIs to access the performance of your blog. Factors like your content writing goal, target audience, available resources, and others should be highly considered before choosing your desired KPIs.
Essential Blog KPIs For Content Writers
It is one thing to produce articles or blog posts as a writer, it is another thing for your writing to get to the right audience to achieve its desired results. In the course of publishing articles on your blog, it is important to check the progress and performance of your work. You can do this by accessing the following metrics.
Traffic Metrics
This set of metrics provides insight into the number of visitors that frequent your blog during a particular period. Evaluating them helps you identify loopholes in your content and SEO strategies. These include website traffic and keyword SERP position.
Website Traffic
Here you monitor the number of visits to your blog. This way, you can access the outreach of your blog posts and the impact of your SEO strategies.
Traffic to a blog can be gotten either organically, through referrals, or by direct visits. Knowing where the bulk of your traffic source comes from will help you understand areas of improvement.
For instance, getting a good number of organic visitors shows that your SEO efforts are yielding good results. This means your audience reaches your blog when they use search engines without a third-party collaboration. You can analyze further by checking the keywords that drive the most traffic and strategize your content brief accordingly.
Getting more traffic from referrals, on the other hand, shows that more visitors are landing your blog through external sources like social media campaigns, ad placement, etc.
Keyword SERP Position
SERP is an acronym for search engine result page. This indicator helps to assess the quality of your organic traffic and compare it to other competitors. For instance, low-ranking posts may require improving the quality of the article and your use of keywords.
Engagement Metrics
Engagement metrics are indicators that your audience connects with your blogs. They are qualitative performance indicators concerned more with the time visitors spend on your blog than with the number of visits. With these metrics, you can tell if your audience finds your content valuable and worth reading.
Time Spent On Your Page And Bounce Rate
These two are essential metrics that content writers use to evaluate the quality of the blog posts they put out. Time spent on your page gives you insight into the amount of time a user spends going through your blog. It is a vital indicator to check if your content is readable, has value, and provides relevant information. For instance, readers will rather skim than read boring content filled with lots of fluffy sentences.
On the other hand, bounce rate measures the percentage of readers that leaves a website, almost immediately, after viewing one page. The lower the bounce rate, the higher the chance that readers find your blog readable and helpful. A high bounce rate could be a result of poor article structuring, an unresponsive site, and the presence of irrelevant information on your blog.
To improve both the time spent on the page and the bounce rate, you need to create accurate, engaging, and readable content.
Pages Per Session
This shows the number of pages a user visits during a session on your website. This indicator shows whether visitors find your content of great quality. Also, the number of pages a user visits during a session shows how easy it is for one to navigate your site.
Scroll Depth
Scroll depth is another KPI that measures how much a user finds your blog posts interesting and useful. It measures how far a user has scrolled down a page. Articles that are well-written, structured, accurate, and optimized with eye-catching visuals will have a high scroll depth.
Conversion Metrics
For most bloggers, the goal doesn’t just end at increasing the number of visits to their sites. It also extends to converting these visits to leads and finally customers.
Conversion Rate
Conversion rate is the percentage of your visitors that you convert to customers. This metric shows how effective your copywriting strategies are.
It is a great metric for landing pages, affiliate marketers, and other sites with a call to action at the end of an article. Tracking this metric will help you identify lapses and improve your marketing goals.
Email And Newsletter Subscribers
If email and newsletter subscriptions are important parts of your marketing campaign as a content writer, you should monitor their progress over time. Tools like Mailchimp and Aweber can help you speed up this process.
Conclusion
Each blogger has different goals in mind when they put out content and invest in their reach. Identifying your content writing goal should be one of your first steps before choosing any metrics.
Furthermore, most blogs take time before they see the desired result. Your blog performance could also fluctuate. When you see these changes, do not panic, but rather identify areas of improvement and make the needed changes.
Do you find these KPIs an effective way to monitor your blog performance? Do you have a favorite among them? Kindly share via the comment section or message me if you have more suggestions.
