Measuring the Quality of your blog posts
Generating traffic is the first step, but retaining the traffic is also important too. If people come to your site, and feel that your website is of no value, they will leave and not return. I’ve created a custom list of things to analyze to figure out the quality of your blog posts.
These figures are from my own blog and are not benchmark figures by any means, but if I can gather a larger amount of statistics, I could perhaps come up with a scoring system to calculate the quality of your posts. Here are the 5 items I felt that shows the quality of your content the best.
- Pageview/Visit ratioThis ratio tells you how many pages each visitor views on average. The higher the better - that means they are finding your website interesting, and are surfing through your links.How to calculate
Go to your stats, and near the top of the page, you’ll see the monthly totals. Pageviews/Visits on your calculator should do the trick. Mine is at 2.58. That means each user, on average, read through 2.58 pages of my blogs. That also means 2.58 clicks per user within the internal pages of my blog.
- LayoversThe term layover, as you probably all know, means to stop by somewhere but only to leave immediately. And this happens in websites too. If somebody comes to your homepage and leaves without clicking any links, chances are, they were not interested. The lower this ratio is on your site, the better.How to calculate
On your stats page, scroll down to the “Entry Pages” and “Exit Pages” section. Get the entry/exit figures for the URL “/” which means your index page. Check out the visit figures of exit/entry for the index page. Mine was 66.4% - this is the ratio of people who came to your site and left on the index page. Of course, some of these people may have cliked “Home” after browsing through your site, but still it’s good enough to tell you something. I’m not really sure if this ratio is bad or not - it sounds high, but then, a lot of people click, scan, and leave if they don’t find what they want and it happens very frequently anyhow.
- Feed Hits This figure is very ambiguous - the hits on the feeds basically include all the hits that feedburner.com, technorati.com, buzzbums.com, and any other type of RSS aggregators make on your site, NOT just the RSS feeds of your fans. 2,384 visitors is what I have. Once again, I really don’t think it’s possible to spend the time analyzing this figure any further. If this figure goes up the next month, be happy.
- Feedburner figures The feedburner counter gives you a somewhat accurate number of how many people are subscribed to your blog via RSS feeds. Subscriptions basically show the intention to return, so that’s a good thing. My high was 62 at one point but right now I’m down to 31. They say this figure dips on the weekends all the time, so I’ll see how far it goes up next week.
- Comments/Post RatioThis involves using some figures from the adminstration panel of your blog platform. On my Wordpress Dashboard, I can instantly see how many posts and comments I have. The higher the figures, the more involved your visitors are. Most people don’t stay. Some read, and few of the readers will comment.How to Calculate
Well, simple… Go to your dashboard, divide the number of comments by the number of posts. I have 5.05 comments per post.
Interesting metrics, you should install Google Analytics as well as using the log analyser your using, it has all sorts of extra things for you to look through. I spend WAY too much time looking through it!
Haha it’s an addiction for sure!!!
I’m starting to play with the Google tools a lot more.. like the Google webmaster tool and trends tool.
I haven’t had a great experience with google analytics. I have found the numbers to be a little off compared to Stat Counter and Dream Host. The numbers were way off when we first were being tracked by Google Analytics, now they’re getting closer.
Great writeup Jeff.
Here’s a wrap-up of the analytics tools we use - and what we use each one for. They all have their own distinct purpose…
Yes, this may be overkill for most folks, but each tool has it’s own strengths. We don’t compare them to each other as they all drop packets (you’ll make yourself go nuts that way), but for long term tracking we always check Google Analytics - that way the deviation from real traffic is consistent, and it’s the trends that are so critical.
1. Google Analytics (awesome tool for aggregate metrics, great for tracking reader activity, traffic sources, traffic conversions, etc),
2. StatCounter (best for real-time daily stats checking - ideally we don’t do too much of that),
3. MyBlogLog (shows you which of your own links were clicked and how often - very powerful) - not to mention the SOOO powerful networking side effect
4. and as of recently http://www.103bees.com (good representation of keywords, phrases, and questions leading people to your site)
5. AWStats comes with our web hosting account so we do use it somewhat - but I’m not too fond of this or the other host-based tools. They’re focused mostly on file hits and stuff, not “marketer metrics”, which is what you’ll really want to focus on. BUT it does show you cool stuff like search engine bot hits and direct referrals from each search engine in a nice format.
6. and of course Feedburner RSS stats
We (ok, really Jennifer - being the organized, read: grounded person that she is), consolidate our stats weekly to know where we are compared to previous weeks, determine what worked best and what didn’t and figure out how to approach the following week.
Same for our AdSense and all affiliate performance metrics for the week, so we know what to try the next week to “beat the control”.
We’re still trying to figure out how to increase our page views per visitor beyond what it is now… after all with 1k visitors a day, there’s a huge potential difference in monetization when you consider 2 hits/visitor vs. 6 hits per visitor.
Added “related posts” at the bottom of each post, also all the plugins to increase comments help. But we’re still hoving around 2.x pages per visitor.
Do you guys have any ideas on what we could try there that we’re not already doing?
Have an awesome day!
Dan
I installed the enquisite.com module, and i completely forgot about it until today.
It’s a stats tool STRICTLY for search engine referral tracking and nothing more.
I couldn’t have asked for a more thorough breakdown!! Thanks Dan and Jennifer. I like MBL for that reason.
Ya, dan and jen sent me some other interesting information on these topics too.. I need to make the time to sit and read it all one day.
Great article. That’s the benefit of Google, having all these tools to pick apart your site and see what’s working and what’s not.
That’s how they got so big.. They offer services to search, and they offer extensive services to help you make your site better.
Hey thats a pretty good way of figuring it all out. All these extra ways to analyze my site are not good for me. I do it way too much already and I could spend even more time just looking at numbers.
Collis just recommended using Google analytics. Collis you must be nuts! This stuff is like crack to me. I’d pay for someone to just do it for me so I could stay on work.
I’m to the point where I’m recovering and I have to force myself not to look at my traffic stats so often.
Jeff, I saw your comment about you supporting Cannibalism. lol Maybe you should write a post about that. I think it would get a lot of reaction. Make sure you put it on netscape and digg. They like that stuff.
Man, you REALLY like hassling Jeff on that don’t you Jim?
He really put himself out there with that example, but I think it was extreme enough to make his point quite well. I’m guessing that won’t be the last comment he’ll see on it though.
Have an awesome day!
Dan
I wish I never wrote this. Sorry Jeff. Delete both?
Jim, it was funny, really. no need to delete it.
Have an awesome day!
Dan
haha Jim don’t worry about it.. I had such a hectic sunday/monday, and it’s my first visit/commenting on my own blog in almost 36 hours. (of course, on Saturday, knowing I cannot write anything on Sunday cause I was helping somebody move, I set 3 future-dated posts - 12, 3, and 6 pm each).
Its always great to come back to find funny posts, I don’t mind at all.
I’ll have to learn to do that.
Question: how long does it take you to write up the average post?
Great point Jeff, we’re going to start doing that too so that we’re posting at least once a day - even though you REALLY need to take a day or two off every week. I think that posting consistency is crucial.
Have an aweseome day!
Dan