There are a lot of ways to measure the progress of a blog, however standard metrics programs don’t always tell the real story for a blog. Having said that, basic blog metrics information is easy to collate and can be a good indication of the success of a blog. These are probably the 8 most important blog metrics for everyday bloggers.
1: How many posts over a given period of time. How many posts per month is a good start. This statistic can be used to compare other statistical information. For example, if you increase or decrease the number of posts, what effect does that have across the other metrics?
2: The average number of comments per post. This can be indication as whether or not you are ‘connecting’ with your reader. This metric can be compared over time to the increase/decrease in traffic. For example, if your traffic increases, does the ratio of comments increase as well.
3: Traffic. There are several traffic measurements that can be useful. How many visitors you receive, how many unique visitors, and over what period. Will you measure per day, week or month?
4: Subscribers. This is not as effective as it once was as many subscribers can be scrappers who are receiving your feed simply to collect any content that be used on their sites. However, increases/decreases in subscription numbers can be useful information.
5: Yahoo Back links. This can be indication as to how popular your content is and whether or not other people are referencing your pages.
6: Technorati authority and ranking. These statistics can be useful for measuring how popular your content is with other bloggers.
7: Search traffic. Knowing how many visitors are arriving via the search engines is a good indication of your SEO activities. You are looking to see a steady increase over a period of time.
8: Page views per visitor. This metric along with your bounce rate can be a good indication of the quality of your content and your site in general. If you have a high bounce rate with a poor page view stat, you may need to rethink your writing and linking campaigns.
This is by no means a definitive look at blog metrics. There are always going to be statistics that are more important on one site compared to others.
