Stuart Brown writes in his article “What’s Wrong With My
Blog?” about the common mistakes that bloggers make with their blogs. He
writes, “Creating a blog is easy – but alas, building a readership is somewhat more
difficult”. He goes on to make several suggestions on ensuring that you have
enough content and selecting appropriate topics. But let’s say that you’re
doing this and want to know how to make more improvements to your blog. How can
you identify what is working on your blog and what is driving visitors away? How
do you measure success for your blog? In
Web Analytics 2.0 , Avinash Kaushik suggests measuring success for a blogs and
non-commerce sites by looking at Visitor behavior. He suggests studying what
visitors to your site are doing and how they are interacting with your content.
He suggests analyzing the following metrics to get more familiar with your site
visitors.
1) Visitor Loyalty
Avinash writes that, “Visitor Loyalty tells you how often
Visitors visit your website during the reporting period”. By looking at the
Visits per visitor report, you can understand one aspect of visitor behavior.
The report will show you the number of visitors and the number of times they
visited the site. This information can be useful because you can determine the
number of visitors that have only visited your website once. If you have a
large percentage of visitors that only visited one time, that may mean that
they do not find the content relevant to what they are looking for or not
engaging enough to keep them coming back to your site.
2) Visitor Recency
“Visitor Recency will tell you how long it has been since a
visitor last visited your website”, writes Avanish. He goes on to write that
this will essentially “measure the gap between two visits from the same person
to your website”. In order to make this
data usable, you will need to determine how often the content on the site is
updated and to set your goals accordingly. If content is updated several times
a day, you may consider having a large percentage of visitors that visited
daily a success.
3) Length of Visit
Avinash writes that Length of Visit measures the quality of
visit as represented by the length of a visitor session in seconds. He suggests
looking at the distribution of visitors and the amount of time they are spending
on the site. If you want to increase the length of time for each visit, ask
yourself how to engage these visitors. He suggests that you may analyze what
content that the visitors that spend the most time on the site are consuming,
and where they are coming from.
4) Depth of Visit
In regards to the Depth of Visit, Avinash says that this
metric measures the distribution of the number of pages in each Visit to the
website. This report helps you understand the content consumption patterns of
your Visitors. This can be valuable as
you can focus on what has been popular historically and avoid spending any time
on producing content that visitors will not engage with.
By looking at these measurements, you should be able to
determine what creates the most value to your blog and what doesn’t.
Sources
Kaushik, Avinash (2010). Web
Analytics 2.0. Indiana: Wiley Publishing Co. 3.
What’s Wrong with my Blog - http://modernl.com/article/whats-wrong-with-my-blog
