How to analyze and evaluate the contribution of a blog to business sales. HOSTiQ Experience
A blog helps businesses keep customers abreast of developments in the market and within the company, giving useful tips on working with various tools, entertaining and simply making life easier. But for a company, a blog is first and foremost traffic, customer loyalty and new subscribers who may become customers in the future.
blog analytics
As content is added, new headings are added, and the subscriber base grows, it becomes necessary to analyze the blog as a separate resource. Using standard reports in Google Analytics, you can analyze traffic, subscribers, depth of views, time on the site, the number of clicks on banners on the blog. But the more data we get, the more questions arise. Therefore, you need to delve into the data to find new growth areas.
We will share our experience in analyzing the blog and evaluating its contribution to the overall value of the site. If you also run a corporate blog of your company and want to better understand in numbers how it affects your business, this article will help you figure it out.
What tools to use
In order to create your blog analytics system, you do not need to use expensive tools. Everything presented below can be used free of charge, and the amount of materials in the public domain is simply limitless.
Google Analytics is free and the most common web analytics system.
Google Tag Manager is a free tag management tool on the site, by installing which you can save your own time and developer time.
Microsoft PowerBI is a free analytic tool that allows you to collect, process and visualize data.
What to analyze
For the analysis of the blog most often use these metrics:
bounce rate
time spent on page
% page out
depth of view
scrolls on the page
traffic from different channels
number of new subscribers
There are more advanced metrics that help delve into the analysis:
determining the best author
determining the best commentator
user involvement in content
assessment of social actions (sharing in social networks)
If your business is focused on sales, with analysis you can understand how a blog affects them.
There are several elements in our blog that allow us to turn users into customers. These are links in articles, banners, buttons with a call to action. Thanks to them, we take the user to the main site, where we offer to buy or test our products.
Initially, to analyze this data, we used events (user interaction with content) and UTM tags, which were placed on elements of interest to us in the blog. This method has disadvantages:
when navigating through UTM tags, the user’s session is overwritten and as a result we don’t see the original traffic pattern
Events show the number of clicks, but they do not reflect the full picture of user transitions. For analysis, you need to create special segments. This is not always convenient, fast and reliable.
blog advertising
Banners, buttons and links lead blog readers to the main site.
How to implement
The solution was setting up advanced e-commerce on a blog. For us, this did not become a difficult task, since we set up its individual elements on the main site. All that remained to be done was to implement tracking of internal advertising on the blog. To do this, we did the following:
Have installed Google Tag Manager on your blog.
We created a presentation in Google Analytics for the blog and for the site.
Customized enhanced e-commerce module.
Set up tracking internal advertising on the blog.
blog advertising statistics
Example statistics on an internal blog campaign from a Google Analytics report
As a result, we received a report in which we see which article, which link or button the user clicks, and how much sales it brings.
