Your blog is an excellent marketing tool for your business and you need to make sure that it is performing at its best. That is where blog analytics plays a very important role. A lot of effort, time, and even money goes into building and managing a blog. If it is not delivering the results it should, you are losing out on all that investment.
Analytics and reporting that is tailored to evaluate blog performance can give you valuable insights into what is working and what is not. This data can help you make better decisions in terms of the content you create for your blog and how you promote it.
What does blog analytics measure?
Blog analytics is a little different from web analytics generally. There are certain kinds of parameters that an analytics software should be measuring to gauge your blog’s performance. Some of these important criteria are –
- Search performance in terms of search impressions and organic click-through rates
- Traffic performance in terms of pageviews, referral sources, and individual post performance
- Lead generation by measuring the number of leads and lead conversions or CTA click-through rates
- Number of inbound links to your blog content indicating your authority in your niche
- Audience engagement based on comments, social shares, time on page, and subscribers
This data can give you a clear picture of how your content is performing and what opportunities you have to increase your blog’s ROI.
Top analytics software for gathering, analyzing, and reporting blog data
When it comes to analytics, be it for a website or a blog, nothing can beat Google Analytics. It is a free tool that most blogs and businesses use by default and for a valid reason. Google Analytics offers you truckloads of data on how your site is performing in Google. And Google being the only search engine most of us care about, this data is invaluable.
Google Analytics can help you measure things like the number of clicks on your content, organic search impressions, search rankings, and more on Google. You also get insights into your audience, their behavior, and your conversions. Google Analytics integrates with other Google advertising and publisher products, so you can make good use of the entire Google suite.
Tableau is a reporting tool that can create data visualizations for your blog or site. It is the best data management software for someone who finds it difficult to wrap their head around the numbers that data analytics usually churns out. And that is, indeed, most people. Tableau represents the same data in terms of graphs and dashboards that can help you actually see the trends and opportunities.
Tableau is priced at $70 per month for individual users. For teams or organizations, you could get a quote depending on your requirements.
SEMrush is another very popular and very powerful blog analytics tool. It helps in measuring your search presence and rankings over time. The SEO tools help you with keyword tracking, inbound links, social shares data, and more. SEMrush also shares recommendations to improve your content’s SEO and rank better in search.
SEMrush is the preferred analytics and reporting tool for many big brands because of its all-in-one approach to SEO and marketing.
The pricing for SEMrush starts at $119.95 per month.
Chartbeat is an analytics tool best suited for platforms that have plenty of content, like a blog. The tool offers a real-time dashboard as well as a historical dashboard so you can see the trends in traffic or audience engagement. You also get details in what percentage of visitors to your blog were subscribers, guests, or unspecified. The tool shows you where your traffic is sourced from and much more.
Overall, Chartbeat is a very easy-to-use analytics tool designed primarily for content-heavy sites.
For pricing information on Chartbeat, you will have to get in touch with the team.
Bitly is probably one tool you would not expect to see in this list. But Bitly is more than the link shortening tool we know it as. It also offers analytics and reporting features to tell you how many times the link has been clicked on. It offers hourly reports of the clicks generated by your links and on which platforms the links have been shared most by people.
Bitly also shows the geographical distribution of clicks that shows where on the map you receive most of the clicks from. This helps you optimize your content to target the right audience for the future.
This tool may not provide detailed analytics as some of the other tools in the list, but the data it provides is still very insightful.
Bitly has a free plan too, but the basic plan starts at $29 per month.
Conclusion
The tool that you decide to use for your blog analytics should depend on what your priorities are. Pay attention to the metrics that each tool shows and decide whether these metrics are relevant or important to the goals you want to achieve with your blog. The tools will only assist you with valuable insights, but the success of your blog will depend on the strategy that you build with this information.
