Blog Metrics
The common way to measure success of some website is to measure number of visitors, unique visitors, page views…But, blog is different kind of website. Blog visitors usually don’t open other pages, latest posts are presented on the front page, so it doesn’t make much sense to measure page views. Many frequent blog readers don’t need to visit blog, they can read new posts through their favorite RSS reader, so number of visitors is also not a good way to measure success of a blog.
In his excellent book “Web Analytics - an Hour a Day” web analytics expert Avinash Kaushik tried to define values we have to measure in order to evaluate success of a blog. These values should answer following questions:
- What is your contribution to your blog?
- Is anyone reading your blog?
- Are people engaged in conversations (”Blog is most social of all social mediums”)
- Are you having effect personally, socially, or in business?
- What is the cost of having a blog?
- What are you or your company getting in return for this investment?
You can read detailed post about this topic on Avinash Kaushik’s blog Occam’s Razor. Avinash was first to define an objective measures of blog success http://www.kaushik.net/avinash/2007/11/blog-metrics-six-recommendations-for-measuring-your-success.html
Inspired by this post Joost de Valk developed Wordpress plugin - Blog Metrics. You can download this plugin here.
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[…] and shows important statistical data about your blog. In one of the previous posts I wrote about Blog Metrics plugin which shows data that is specific for blogs. This plugin shows data common to all websites, after […]