How do you measure the success of your blog? As authors we spend hours thinking about our audience, drafting content and engaging in conversations. Depending on the type of audience, or the type of site you run, you may be consciously, and sometimes subconsciously, optimizing for different sets of goals. Come to think of it, when was the last time you revisited your goals? Do you have a good sense for performance of your recent posts with respect to the baseline or historical trends?
Well, the good news is, if you are a PostRank Analytics user (and if not, we have a free trial) this process just got a whole lot easier!
First, once you connect your Google Analytics account to bring in the key on-site metrics, PostRank will now also import all of your goals and display the value and conversions for each individual article.
Drill into your latest article and you’ll find an at a glance view summarizing your performance. If you update your goals in Google Analytics, PostRank will transparently update and surface all of your data for easy consumption.
That said, on-site goals and metrics are important, but they only provide part of the picture. After all, 80% of the conversations about your content happen off-site. PostRank already aggregates all of these conversations, assembles an activity stream for your content, and determines the overall engagement for each of your posts based on this data. (Learn more about how PostRank defines and measures engagement.)
So, with that in mind, each of your posts will now also feature an “earned value”, which is based on the total engagement accumulated by the post. Now you can track the ROI of your on-site and off-site engagement all in once place.
How does PostRank determine the earned value of offsite engagement? For each activity, a weighted engagement score is computed, which roughly correlates to the effort that the user needed to put in to perform that action. For example, a bookmark requires less effort than leaving a full comment on your site. From there, PostRank uses the total engagement value and assigns a default value of $0.25 to each point. Why $0.25? Assuming an average of ~$20/hour value of your visitors’ time, we observed that an average high engagement commenter takes ~5 minutes to read and reply. Based on that calculation, a PostRank engagement point is equal to ~$0.25, hence the default. In the near future, you will be able to modify and adjust this weight if you find it too low or too high for your site.
Have other ideas or metrics that you track (or would like to) to measure the ROI of your site? Let us know in the comments.