This article first defines the difference between the two terms blogger and influencer and then goes into the top 10 KPIs for measuring the success of a blog or individual posts. The terms blogger and influencer are often used synonymously, but there is an important difference: bloggers always have a blog! Influencers, on the other hand, maintain social media channels, e.g. on Instagram or YouTube. Of course, bloggers can also be influencers and vice versa. Accordingly, other KPIs are relevant for bloggers and their channel, the blog, than for social media influencers.
Content
- Definition Blogger & Influencer
- KPI #1 Unique Visitors
- KPI #2 Visits
- KPI #3 Page Impressions
- KPI #4 Pages per session
- KPI #5 Average session duration
- KPI #6 Bounce rate
- KPI #7 Traffic sources
- KPI #8 Top Viewed Posts
- KPI #9 Average Views per Post
- KPI #10 Keyword Ranking
Definition Blogger & Influencer.
###Definition Blogger “The publisher or author of a blog is called a blogger. In principle, anyone can publish a blog and write in it their opinions on personal or business topics on the Internet.”
###Definition Influencer Martin Faltl defines influencers as follows: “Influencers are creative individuals who (1) regularly produce publicly available content, (2) are willing to collaborate with brands in doing so, and (3) whose content influences the behavior of followers.”
KPI #1 Unique Visitors
The number of unique visitors is a meaningful traffic indicator. Behind this number is the number of visitors that are reached with the blog. A distinction is made between new users who visit the blog for the first time and returning visitors. Due to statistical inaccuracies, the number of users is not one hundred percent accurate. This is due to anonymization tools that make it difficult to classify users. Nevertheless, user numbers are a useful and important KPI for traffic analysis.
KPI #2 Visits
During the visits of the blog or sessions, all individually accessed pages within a session of a visitor are summarized. If the user visits the website or blog again the following day, a new session begins. This metric can be used to identify returning visitors.
KPI #3 Page Impressions
With page impressions or page views, each individually accessed page is counted. In most cases, this means a high number of page impressions, so that the blog ranks well in Google for certain articles and the users do not only call up one page when visiting the blog, but several. However, page impressions should never be considered in isolation, but always in combination with other metrics, such as dwell time.
KPI #4 Pages per session
The higher this number is, the better. Because the more pages or posts users call up during a session on your blog, the longer they stay on the blog, which can be taken as a good indication. After all, it doesn’t do much for Google’s qualitative blog rating if visitors leave the site right after the first page visit. This applies at least to the perspective of the blogger himself. In the context of cooperations, this number can or should be lower, since readers optimally click on a link to the page or product of the cooperation partner.
KPI #5 Average session duration
This number indicates the average amount of time a user spends on a page. A high value here is a quality factor, which is also highly rated by Google. If many users regularly stay on the page for a long time, the website or blog must offer valuable and interesting content.
KPI #6 Bounce rate
The bounce rate shows how many users only look at one page on the blog and then disappear again. If this percentage is high, it is not necessarily bad, because, for example, regular readers often only stay for one article on the blog. Nevertheless, bloggers should aim to reduce the bounce rate. To achieve this, users should be offered options that encourage them to stay longer, such as further links, similar articles, videos and/or podcasts, a search function, a sidebar with interesting information, etc.
KPI #7 Traffic sources
Google distinguishes between the different traffic sources from which visitors come to your blog.
- Organic Search: Visitors come to your blog via organic search from Google, Bing or other search engines.
- Direct: Visitors arrive at your blog by entering the blog’s URL in the browser bar. These are usually regular readers.
- Referral: Visitors come to your blog via a link on another website. If this number is high, this is evidence of very good backlink building.
- Social: Visitors come to your blog via social media (such as Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest, etc.).
- E Mail: Visitors come to your blog via links in emails, such as newsletters.
- Other: Visitors come to the blog via other sources, e.g. the RSS feed.
KPI #8 Top Viewed Posts
This listing only indirectly a KPI, but gives a good insight about which posts are most popular on the blog. This view is particularly exciting to possibly find further article topics around the most popular blog posts. However, it should be noted that older posts naturally have more views than younger ones.
KPI #9 Average Views per Post
This metric is good for understanding how each blog post contributes to overall traffic. It’s also a great metric to understand the correlation between volume/frequency and results. If more is being published on the blog, but the average views of the posts are decreasing it means that each of the posts is getting fewer views. This could indicate that quality is suffering in favor of quantity.
KPI #10 Keyword-Ranking
The keyword ranking of the blog or individual articles is not a direct KPI, but it should serve as a success factor for the findability of the blog. The better a blog is ranked for the relevant keywords, the better it will be found by the target group. Good keyword ranking is also a quality feature of the respective blog posts.
Note: Bloggers need an analysis tool to evaluate their blog. Tools such as Google Analytics are ideal for this purpose.