You’ve worked hard on getting your blog set up, creating your pillar posts for the launch, learnt WordPress, made your theme look beautiful and you’ve been pinning on Pinterest like crazy. So it’s no wonder you now want to check your engagement to justify your hard work and dedication.
The analysis of your blog engagement is important for knowing what content to create more of – if people are loving or not loving certain content, you have a better idea of what to concentrate more on. It also helps to provide clues on who your audience is, especially if you’re a new blogger.
If you’re a new blogger and you’ve stumbled across this post, you’ll be well aware of the sage advice from pro bloggers: Know your audience! (Click here to read this post which can help you as a new blogger figure out how on earth you can know your audience without many stats as a guide).
Social Media and Sharing Tools
You’ve created what you believe is interesting, valuable and share-worthy content but now you need to ensure it’s easily shareable. Sharing buttons at the top, middle or bottom of your post make it simple for your readers to share, and the more straightforward this process is, the more your content is likely to be shared.
Shares are important because only getting traffic to your site without the shares, could mean an increased bounce rate and visitors not engaging with your content as much as you’d hoped.
Shares are important because only getting traffic to your site without the shares, could mean an increased bounce rate and visitors not engaging with your content as much as you’d hoped. Click To Tweet
There are a variety of plugins for WordPress that count the number of shares so you can go into the backend and analyze the sharing stats. Some plugins have buttons which automatically count the number of shares and it appears as a number next to the sharing button as a clear indication of how many shares your post got.
If you want to track activity across your different social media accounts in one place, Hoot Suite is a great tool for this.
Google Analytics
Google Analytics is a must-have tool to track the numerous metrics for measuring the engagement on your blog. Most commonly, bloggers track bounce rate, average visit duration, relationship ratio (new vs returning), and pages viewed per visit.
It’s also amazingly helpful to see where your traffic is coming from (such as redirects from Pinterest, direct searches, Google searches), and helps you to improve your keyword usage and future content creation.
Use a Plugin
Using a plugin on your WordPress blog can help to simplify tracking your metrics and level of content engagement. There are many plugins to choose from so it’s hard to name just a few, but if you don’t have one yet, try Content Engagement, Digg Digg, Disqus Comment System, Facebook Like Box and Comment on Twitter Button as a start.
Blog Metrics is another plugin which tracks averages including the number of tweets and other shares for each post, including the number of comments.
Clicky is another plugin for tracking detailed statistics such as bounce rate, users currently on your blog, number of actions, organic searches and more, and displays it on your admin dashboard. It automatically inserts the Clicky Web Analytics tracking code into each page on your blog.
Measure Regularly
One of the tips to measure your engagement quickly is to check it everyday. This way, you don’t have large chunks of data to digest and especially if you’re creating content regularly, you’ve got a great understanding of what your readers want and what content they have already readily engaged with on your blog.
Measuring blog engagement is less about trying to increase your page views and drive traffic, and rather about analysing and understanding your current metrics.
Measuring blog engagement is less about trying to increase your page views and drive traffic, and rather about analysing and understanding your current metrics. Click To Tweet
Do you track blog engagement on your blog? Any tips and tricks? I’d love to hear from you 🙂
