Explore ways to enhance your website and blog conversion by establishing key performance indicators or blogging KPIs. Determine, measure and write the blog posts that will best engage your readers and deliver the answers and results they seek.
Transcript:
Hi and welcome to episode #10 of Be Seen Blogging. I’m your host, Jen Miller and I’ll be sharing with you what blogging KPIs are and how you can measure them to enhance conversion on your website. Whether you are just starting out or have a seasoned audience, I hope you find this information will help you in a very real way.
When evaluating the performance of a blog we often review KPIs or key performance indicators. Items such as the number of views or the amount of click throughs are important. However measuring the number of likes or shares and retweets and seeing if the visitors were returning or new and their level of engagement – did they stop at one post of travel through the website are all critical factors to determining your success.
Most bloggers are more concerned about telling a story and drawing in the reader with a well-composed post. However if you are trying to make money on your website you need to create some actionable deliverables or goals referred to in the sale world as KPIs.
I think KPIs should always be attached to a value. One might be to increase monthly sales by 20%. To reach this goal or KPI you may want to include more frequent and specific posts with a visual call to action linked to a particular product. You might increase your posting in social media or your ad spend. Regardless of how you choose to create or share content, when you attach a “how” to “anticipated growth,” you set up indicators that show if your plan is working.
Obvious ways to know you have a working plan are increases in conversion. If you start blogging and posting to social media and they notice an uptake in sales, you don’t have to stop taking orders to run a report. Look at the metrics as you have time and keep doing what you’re doing! When discussing the trends with your marketing team or investors, you’ll be able to fall back on the statistics and see exactly where and why the increase occurred – that’s the beauty of setting up metrics before you get started.
Throughout the designated time period you will need to monitor the following as these are the real indicators that show how your goal was reached.
Look for traffic growth and spikes and see when and how they were caused.
Your reporting will show whether you are seeing new vs existing users. If the bulk of your reader base is returning, then you need to be sharing your posts to a new audience. We all love return readers but the trick is to widen that base with every piece of content.
Monitor how and when the reader came to your site. This gives you a good read of the best times to post. And if you are running a Facebook or Twitter campaign and find that you have no hits to your site when the campaign is active, you’ll be able to decipher that perhaps that is not the best use of funds.
How long are your readers staying on your site, what pages are readers visiting and are they traveling to multiple pages?
Are they subscribing or requesting more info?
Perhaps you find that they are using your site search and having that result in a purchase.
If you have affiliate links are they leaving your site to go to those sites?
Are your viewers reading about a product and moving on to checkout or signup and then stopping before completing the sale or booking an appointment?
All of these are items to review and consider as you analyze your key performance indicators, the numbers that show whether or not your blog posts are effective.
When setting up KPIs, make sure they fit your overall goals as a company – for a Realtor that may mean more home value requests. For an eCommerce site that could mean higher cart values and completed checkouts. For a doctors office, it could be more online appointments scheduled.
You get it, every business has to define their own KPIs, whether devised by a sole proprietor or a management team and explained to every team member. Targeted KPIs can be tracked even better when team members understand and are on-board, because even if the customer starts on the website, they may decide to pick up the phone instead of finishing the transaction online. This is especially true with larger priced items, such as travel or vehicle purchases. When too many clicks and decisions are required, a reader may skip the cart hoping to connect in person.
And that is okay. After all the entire reason you are blogging in the first place is to engage and connect, so you can share the value of your service or product. Sometimes the true KPI is the voice on the other end of the phone, smiling as you ease them through their purchase. Just make sure you record the call as a website win if it started there so your metrics will be accurate.
Thank you for listening in to Be Seen Blogging, episode #10 where we discussed Blogging KPIs and what they mean, all in under 10 minutes. If you are enjoying this podcast, please review it on iTunes or Stitcher and share it with your friends. You can reach me Jen Miller on Twitter @jenblogs4u or through my Need Someone To Blog website. I look forward to answering questions you may have in future episodes. Talk to you next week!
Jen Miller has been writing since she was a child and spent her early career years soaking up all the information she could discover as a journalist of newspapers and magazines. Getting out the message and spreading truth has always been a high priority for Jen. Jen began writing website content for clients in 1996 and started blogging in 2008 for Today.com. That experience created a love for the blog and she has been an avid blogger ever since. Today she writes for her clients on a variety of topics as a ghostwriter/ghostblogger and connects their messages with personality through social media to deliver the most impact possible.
