5 KPIs Every Blogger Should be Tracking to grow their blog

Being a successful blogger and online entrepreneur is all about learning
how to do more than write and post – you have to think like a digital
marketer. With

Blogging isn’t something that’s new to the internet but having a blog is something that almost everyone has these days. Blogging isn’t merely about being a good writer, or the industry would be even more saturated.

Image: CreateHer Stock 

Being a successful blogger and online entrepreneur is all about learning how to do more than write and post – you have to think like a digital marketer. With 37% of marketers saying that blogging is the most valuable type of content marketing, it’s something you want to make the most of.

What makes a successful blog? Depending on what your goals for your blog are, that could mean getting sponsorships, making money or even landing your dream job. 

 Regardless, there are five basic key performance indicators (KPIs) that every blogger should be paying attention to:

1.      Unique users

Having lots of readers viewing your blog every day is the goal for anyone creating content online. Instead of focusing on getting 500 views of a single post, it’s important that the amount of unique users to get you to that number is close to it. It doesn’t matter if your post was viewed 20x if there are only 3 unique users getting you to that number. That’s isn’t to say that having recurring users is bad thing for your site – it’s good.

If people are returning to read your content over and over again, you’re doing something right and they love you. But keep in mind, it’s about growing your audience, and measuring unique events, users, views, etc. is going to help you create a strategy to do so.

2.      Organic Traffic

Search engine optimization (SEO) goes hand-in-hand with content marketing. There is no point in creating any new content for your site, blog post or not. Check your Google Analytics to see how your content is performing in the search engines. If less than 25% of your viewers are coming from organic traffic, you have to work on your SEO.

There are two parts to SEO – the tactics and the strategy. The strategy includes writing original content and adding to the conversation on topics that are already being written about; publishing on other sites such as LinkedIn and more. Next comes the tactics, which include keyword research, building the right web pages, etc.

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3.      Bounce Rate

If you aren’t familiar with bounce rate, this measure the percentage of site visitors that land on the page and leave without taking any action. Pages with lots of copy and few links to continue on your site will most likely have the highest bounce rate, and that’s normal. You can’t expect readers to take action when there’s nothing to take action on. But if you have high bounce rates on pages that are tracking events, you might have a problem.

Do a quick website audit and figure out how you can better place things like buttons, links or even your search bar to bring the bounce rate down. This could also be a content issue, so always updating your posts and the copy can also help.

4.      Social Shares

You definitely want people to be continuing the conversation of your blog posts on their timelines. People share good content they think their followers can benefit from. Posting informational and interesting content will increase how many people are sharing content from your blog. While getting likes and retweets of your content when you’re posting about it but what makes even more of an impact is allowing your audience to do it for you. At the end of the day, companies build products and customers build brands.

5.      Conversion rate

Conversion rate might be the most important KPI to track in any business. When you’re trying to create content/copy that converts, blogging gets a lot harder. But what does it really mean for readers to convert? Let’s say you just wrote an amazing review of a new lipstick and are now an affiliate for the brand. So you’ll be getting a small commission for each lipstick someone buys using your coupon code.

It doesn’t matter if it’s a blog post, YouTube video or Instagram post – the goal is to get readers to click through and make the purchase. The percentage of people who take action, out of all those who just read your blog is your conversion rate.

Setting goals for your business or blog is crucial to your growth. Tools such as Google Analytics, Adobe Analytics, etc. allow online content creators to create a realistic strategy for the year.

By using different data analytics and visualization tools, 2% of bloggers are able to make $150k by blogging for less than 2 hours per day. By paying attention to at least these five KPIs, you can do the same.

What KPIs are you measuring on your blog?