Is your blog working? Here is how you know.
Blogs. It seems like everyone has one but only a few people know why. Here I am going to walk you through answering the question of “is our blog working” and how to improve it!
Why do you have a blog?
There are three main reasons for a blog. You probably created your blog for one of the following reasons, but you should decide to attach all three eventually.
- Updating your audience
- Gaining Organic Rankings
- Influencing your site traffic / Product tutorials
If you can think of another reason for this please send me a message
Updating Your Audience With Information
This is probably the original reason the “blog” was created. To provide your reader’s information. But how do you know if it is or is not working?
Google Analytics Events! (Your blogs BFF)
Google Analytics has these super cool things called “Events” that allow you to have three criteria. Category, Lable, Action and you can use these to measure just about anything, including the depth of scroll on your site.
It will end up looking something like this
This is how we set it up using the following event criteria.
- Category = “Engagement Report”
- Label = “Scroll Report”
- Action = Scroll depth in percentage (i.e. “10”, “25”, “50”, “90”, etc)
Setting this up will allow you to do two things. It will allow you to (A) Answer the question of “Which is the most engaging blog post” (B) Where am I losing people on this blog post, (C) Where should I add a CTA.
Boom! Pretty awesome right?
We love these automatic events because they take a short amount of time to set it up and run in the background for years.
Feel free to contact us if you would like us to set these types of advanced events for your company or here is a simple tutorial on how to do it yourself!
Is Our Blog Getting Organic Rankings?
This is the more aggressive question. Meaning that you are now not just providing value, but trying to compete with everyone else as to who is providing the “Most” value in Google’s eyes.
We now have the ability to measure this. And this is how you do that.
- First You are going to go to Google Search Console (if you do not have that setup, Read this)
If you get stuck, feel free to send us a message
- Second, you are going to set up a URL Authentication (not domain level) Read This
- Third, you are going to link your Google Analytics Account and your Google Search Console Accounts together. Read This
Now, if you go into Google Analytics and view the report of Acquisition > Search Console > Landing Pages. You can now view which landing pages are doing the best organically and furthermore if you add this with the above step you can see where your organic traffic is leaving you.
I’m just going to leave that there for you. But… if you wanted to go one step deeper. You could measure the effectiveness of the pages you do rank for.
To do this, you just need to set up your eCommerce report and then you will get “Page Value” in the far right-hand corner. Now you know “how valuable” the page is to your business.
Why You Should Measure Your Blog.
Retargeting. Retargeting. Retargeting. That is the name of the game.
If your blog post is answering a quick question of “How do I set up an email account” a person might come to your website and then leave.
You should ask yourself, is this traffic valuable to our business or are these people just passing through. You might just want to spend your retargeting dollars on just the people who hit 80% scroll or people who clicked into your call to action box.
if you are offering more indepth strategy style posts, then it might be adventagous to suggest parrallel content within your content clusters.
In summary
If you have a blog, make sure you know “Why do you have a blog” then measure the effectiveness of that blog. Often times we just believe it will happen when there are other steps you can take to grow at a faster pace.
