How to Tell If Your Blog Strategy Is Working

You’ve worked hard to develop a content strategy for your blog that houses unique and thoughtful content, but it is common to question whether or not your blog strategy is actually working. Seasoned digital marketers are no stranger to in-depth analysis and measuring the results of marketing campaigns.

Measuring the success of a blogging strategy is actually a relatively simple task, and there are several KPIs you can track to determine whether your strategy is working or not. Here are some questions you should ask yourself when determining the success of your content strategy.

Are People Engaging with Your Blog Content on Social Media?

When a new blog is published on a website, often the first tactic to generate interest is sharing the blog on social platforms. Through tracking social engagement, we can get a simple picture of whether or not your blogging strategy is working. If one of your KPIs is social engagement, this goes without saying that metrics on your social platforms should be tracked. At the granular level, there are two primary engagement metrics to track for both your content marketing and social media marketing strategy:

1. 1. Likes and Comments:

      The number of engagements provides a good indication of whether your content resonates with your audience.

   2. Engagement Rate:

      This is most commonly tracked by comparing the number of engagements with your social content to the impressions. Your goal engagement rate should be around 2-5%, though this can vary because accounts with a higher following often have lower engagement rates.

Is There Traffic Going to Your Blogs? 

Getting likes and comments on social media is a great first step to evaluating if your blogging strategy is working, though it does not paint a full picture of the metrics needed to determine the success of a blogging strategy. The best thing someone can do to determine whether or not their blogging strategy is working is to examine the amount of traffic going to the blogs, whether through paid or organic means. 

Is Your Blog Generating Organic Search Traffic  

Check your organic landing page traffic in Google Analytics or your “clicks” in Google Search Console to see if search-engine users are finding your content. If your content is not generating organic landing page traffic, you may need to re-evaluate your content from a search engine optimization perspective. 

Does Your Blog Rank for Any Keywords? 

In order for users to read your blog, they have to be able to find it. When writing a blog as part of an SEO content strategy, the topic you write about should include relevant keywords and related content to support the primary targeted keywords. By using relevant keywords in blogs, you send strong signals to not only the reader but to Google Crawlers indicating what your content is about.  

Identifying the right keywords for a blog can be done in several ways; our favourites are Ahrefs, KWFinder and Google Search Console. Often, these tools will provide you with the average ranking of keywords over a set period of time. Knowing this information can drive your blog optimization efforts, giving you insight into what concepts can be expanded upon to support your blogging content or give you signals that content may need to be reworked to appear for the targeted keywords. 

Is There Traffic Coming from Social Media? 

Simply put, this is the amount of traffic going to your blogs from your organic social posts. Though different social platforms can track clicks to blog posts, we recommend implementing UTM parameters to get a clear picture of what social platforms are driving traffic to your website. 

Are You Running Ads to Your Blogs? 

Paid traffic to your website can be a huge contributor to your blogging success. When looking at paid visitor engagement, you’ll want to look at high-level metrics including clicks, click-through-rate, and soft conversions such as newsletter sign-ups. You’ll also want to see what’s happening on the Google Analytics side of things by paying attention to metrics like avg. session duration, bounce rate, pages/session, etc. 

Is Your Content Being Read? 

Though this is a slightly more complex method of tracking success from blogging efforts, you can measure whether or not your content is being read by utilizing two primary methods: 

1. 1. Heat Mapping:

      Heat mapping software like Mouseflow, CrazyEgg or Hotjar make it easy to visualize how your audience is browsing a page. Behaviours can be examined by seeing not only where your reader is browsing on a page, but also how much they are reading by looking at how far they are scrolling.

   2. Soft Conversion Tracking:

      By setting up custom events in Google Analytics, you can see how many people are taking action to read additional or supporting content. Tracking soft conversions like PDF downloads, presentation downloads, or other website actions can help you determine if your content is resonating with your audience (and provide additional opportunities for remarketing).

Is Your Blog Driving Action?

Perhaps one of the simplest metrics to track (though also extremely important) in determining the success of a blogging strategy is questioning whether or not the blog content is driving any leads. Because your blogs should be used to support core services or products on your website, tracking what your audience does after they land on your page is extremely important.

Whether your goal is to drive readers to a contact page, service, or product page, tracking website actions (such as button clicks) and leads (goal completions in Google Analytics) will give you better insight into what your readers are looking for, and help you develop content that aligns with what they are searching for.

If lead data is not telling you much, Google Analytics has funnel-analysis tools to evaluate how users navigate your site. This can give you insight into how your blogs may contribute to the overall sales funnel on the website. If you are tracking conversions with a value assigned, reviewing page-value can be another valuable approach to evaluating the “worth” of your blogging strategy.

Writing a blog is simple. Demonstrating its value takes a bit more work. Review your blog strategy regularly and ensure you align your efforts with tangible KPIs. Measure your results and reiterate.