Blogging is an important digital marketing tactic. Organizations that blog more than eight times per month receive significantly higher traffic to their website and increased leads. In the span of two years, one of our clients went from approximately 1000 website visitors to 22,000 visitors per month. To make sure that you are getting the most out of your blogging activities you should understand the metrics that you can monitor and how to improve them.

Here is a list of the metrics you should be using:

Individual Blog Post Views

The success of your blog relies on the quality of the content that you publish on your blog. If the quality is not of a high standard – it will not generate the traffic or leads that your business should be gaining.

You need to analyze which topics readers are more interested in. With this, you can then focus your efforts on creating content on the same subject. For example if people are more interested in reading about living room design compared to kitchen design – your focus should be on the former.

Another thing to analyze is the structure of the blog posts and their titles. If blogs that have a substantial introduction perform better, you should create content with that in mind.

Referral Sources

Take an active interest in where your blog is generating traffic from. Should you be utilizing social media or a PPC campaign, you can notice whether or not particular platforms are working for your brand and content.

Should the majority of your traffic be generated from an individual source, you should concentrate your efforts on that source.

By also looking deeper into those who are buying from the different sources, you can determine where the higher number of quality leads are being generated; allowing you to focus on individual sale paths.

Call-to-Action Performance

Traffic means nothing if your call-to-actions has little or no effect on persuading visitors to click through. You need to ascertain whether your call to actions is working. There are several components of a call to action which you should maintain which can improve their performance:

Making the offer more compelling – like offering an exclusive free ebook on how to design a kitchen
Giving the reader an offer that is aligned with the blog post.
A/B testing your call to actions is a great way to ‘road test’ two types of call to actions and seeing which one is performing better. As soon as you can determine which one is better, replace the poor performing CTA with a new call to action. Keep doing this until one call to action continually performs better than others.

Once the above have been optimized, you can use the following three metrics to achieve an effective blogging campaign.

Blog Leads

Monitor how many leads are generated every month from your blogging activity. Notice trends in the topics that generate the best leads and keep those trends for your focus in future months. Also, monitor successful calls to action.

Visitor to lead ratio

A good metric to understand whether your call to actions is compelling is to monitor the rate of leads that are generated compared to the number of visitors.

Leads into Customers

Finally, you should monitor how many of your blogging leads have been converted into customers. This will determine whether your blog content and your offers are aligned to your products.

Blogging is an effective method to gain leads, as long as you monitor the results and develop methods to improve them. Keep up with the metrics named above and you should see an improvement in the quality and frequency of the leads you generate.

About Michael Conway and Means-of-Production

My firm builds Squarespace websites, Houzz profiles, and content marketing and advertising solutions for architects, interior designers, design-build contractors and landscape design firms. Our all-in-one tactics attract the right clients with exceptional architectural photography and brand messaging that sets you apart from the competition. Contact me for a free-of-charge consultation and marketing review. It takes about 40 minutes and you'll be provided a list of actionable improvements designed to solve your specific marketing problems.