The question arises inevitably sooner or later: How do you measure the success of your corporate blog activity?
Now that you have a corporate blog up and running and your head of department is regularly dropping by asking “And, ? Are those reader numbers going up already?” - what are the tools that you have at your disposal to help you measure the success of your blogging, podcasting and videocasting activities that compose your “Online Media Center”?
In answer to this question, I have drafted here some of the most effective tools that will help you in measuring the success of your online media activities:
1. GOOGLE Analytics
There seems to be no way to avoid the might of search engine giant GOOGLE. Among the various diversifications, we find in the GOOGLE shopping basket, its website analytics tool certainly is a heaven-sent gift for any Internet marketer - and blog-and podcast editor! Here are some of the metrics that GOOGLE Analytics provides you with:
- Visitors stats (Visits, Unique Visits, Pageviews, Time on site, New Visits, Page Views, Bounce Rates, Average Visitor and Browser Profiles)
- Traffic Sources (Direct Traffic, Referring Sites, Search Engines)
- Content stats (Page Views of Top Content)
- Goals (Measuring business objectives after specific actions such as a purchase, a download or a registration)
The map overlay in the visitors section for example allows you to access a graphical representation of the origin of your readership:
2. RSS Analytics tools
There is a great array of RSS feeds analytics tools that you may use to measure the success of your corporate blog activities. I invite you to type “RSS analytics” or “RSS metrics” (quotation marks included please!) into your preferred search engine to find the one you are most comfortable with. For reasons of simplicity, I will present Feedburner - one of the market leaders which does a good job for me.
Feedburner (www.feedburner.com) provides a great service that allows you to track the number of people that have subscribed to your feeds. Any blog installation comes with a feed address - usually an ‘Entries feeds’ address (your blog entries) and a ‘Comments feeds’ address (comments left to your articles). Have at look at the right menu bar of this blog, and you will see these, together with their orange RSS logos. By opening a (free) account with Feedburner, you will gain access toi nformation in regards to the readership of your blog. Feedburner also offers a variety of paid services that increase the pertinence of your tracking efforts.
3. Podcast and video download numbers
The success of your media platform can also be measured by the number of downloads you achieve per month. Although this ratio does not provide you with detailed information such as return visits, new visits and time spent viewing or listening to your podcast or videocast , the overall volume of files downloaded provides you nevertheless with some valuable information about the interest your blog is generating. Be aware though that this number does not provide you with any information in regards to how ‘high’ the quality of your podcast or videocast really is - increased download rates are affected by a variety of factors such as improved search engine ranking - especially in the initial phases of your new online media platform installation.
This screenshot comes out of a “Webtrends” web statistics page of www.blogs.beautifuloceans.com - one of my clients - and shows the top 25 links and the respective access numbers to individual media files. As you can see, some mp3 (podcast) files of the Beautiful Oceans blog & podcast media center are right on top of weekly access - and growing numbers form one week to the other are an indicator of success of a particularly successful article and media file (podcast, videocast). For example, the podcast with the title, “Great White Sharks - Top Predators” has been accessed 64 times during the time interval for which the table above has been generated.
4. Links pointing to your corporate blog
If someone links back to your corporate blog there is fair chance that your work has caught the attention of someone - otherwise, why would he want to share your entry with his readership? There is a straightforward way to know not only how many websites link to your corporate blog but also who exactly that is! Go to GOOGLE and enter the following operator for your search:
link:mycorporateblog.com
The result being a list of all websites containing a link to your corporate blog. Isn’t this convenient?..:-)
5. Number of comments on your postings
The number of visitors, the number of downloads of your media files and traffic numbers are all metrics that allow you to track the success of your blogging and podcasting activities - but it does not necessarily provide you with a clear picture whether your entries are as much appreciated by your readers as you would like to believe. Numerous factors enter the ‘quality metrics’ of your blog & podcast activities, to name just a few: finding a catchy title for your blog (but don’t make the mistake to mislead your public for the sake of getting hits!), the fit between your topic and your readership, your writing style, the way you entice readers to take part in a discussion (to leave comments) and many more. Knowing some writing strategies is tentamount and you are best off to know where you are going before you start - although you will be able to adapt the way you write and to learn more blogging techniques while being on your way. The best metric in terms of the quality of your blog and podcasts are feedbacks left in the form of comments. Controversial or ‘hot’ topics are more likely to generate feedbacks just as much as well thought through and professionally written blogs.
I am sure that I left some good sources out here - so please feel free to add any source I may have forgotten.
Cheers, Stephan
