Lessons in Driving Traffic and Engagement to Blogs
Dec 29, 2008 Blogs, Digital Marketing & Metrics, Microblogging, Search Marketing, Social Media, Web Analytics, social networks
The Lineup: Courtesy Stock.xchng KLatham
Traffic and engagement are not the same thing. Likely you know that. Quality vs Quantity…
Having people visiting my site looking for Chia Pets and Chicken Recipes and Fred Flinstone is ultimately not my goal. People who visit my site using these search terms don’t tend to stick around very long, but they show up in my ‘traffic’ report nonetheless.
Quite some time ago Avinash Kaushik from Occam’s Razor gave me access to Google’s Custom Reporting and Advanced Segmenting which were at the time in beta. I had played with the new features quite a bit with my work websites, but not with my blog. I decided it was time to do so, with the goal of figuring out how to grow my community of readers, and engage those of you who are regular visitors – for example getting you to comment, visit regularly etc. Using the extra reporting functions I was able to find out some interesting stuff:
- My most valuable new visitors were referrals (visiting from another website) and most were visiting from blogs I had commented on. These visitors, over visitors from Facebook, Twitter, Technorati or Blog directories; spent more time on my blog and visited a higher number of pages.
LESSON
- Commenting on other blogs drives interested and engaged traffic and hopefully subscribers - Most returning visitors (those who aren’t subscribed via RSS, visiting directly or via a bookmark) visit again from Facebook, Twitter, Google and MichelleKostya.com
LESSON
- It is worth promoting blogs on social networks such as Facebook and Twitter by linking new posts. - The keywords that drove the most valuable search traffic (pages/visit and time spent) to my site over the last few months were to posts on politics.
LESSON
- Posts on current events drive traffic. - Keywords including “mego”, MEGOAgain”, “Mego Michelle”, “Michelle Kostya” etc spend the most amount of time on my site compared to site average. Duh…they were looking for me. Other keywords that engaged my visitors: Facebook advertising, Facebook ignoring friends, jetblue twitter duty, corporate tweet, Loblaws, Sony, Sheridan
LESSON
- Optimize site and posts around keywords that engage.
- Brand names are often searched and can drive traffic although not all engage readers enough for them to stick around.
- Continue to write posts on social media and Web 2.0! - Unfortunately, since most return visitors came directly to the main page it is hard to determine what content is driving them back via Google Analytics. However, if you I look at my Feedburner stats and refer back to the articles posted around that time my readers enjoyed these posts over the last 30 days (why does Feedburner only allow me to break data by 1 day, 1 week, 1 month or “all time”?) the most popular posts to my return visitors are:
- Social Media’s Next Victim
- Kid’s Say the Funniest Things #2
- My Top 15 Web 2.0 Sites
- 5 Tips to Organize Google Reader
- He Sleeps! A Miracle
Interesting – a mixed bag of social media posts AND parenting. However, one thing I do know about these posts is that they were either short or broken up by bullets or subject headings.LESSON
- Short is good
- Break long posts into sections or use formatting to break the post up into smaller bites! - I have been racking my brain to find ways to encourage commenting, this is a good sign that readers are enjoying what they are reading on my blog. However, this is not the only way to measure this.
LESSON
- Measure depth of visit, number of pages/visit
- Time spent on site
- Return Visitors vs. New Visitors
What kind of lessons can you share about building your blog community? Where do your readers come from? How do you measure engagement?
Popularity: 18% [?]
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Tags: analytics, avinash kaushik, Blogs, commenting, community, engagement, facebook, feedburner, google advanced segments, google custom reports, keywords, search terms, seo, twitter, web 2.0, web traffic
December 29th, 2008 at 11:27 am
Wow! Those are some interesting stats. How do I gather stats like that for my blog to analyze? It would be great to write more engaging posts. One other way to find what interests your readers is to analyze the most commented on posts. What was the content of the post? The style of the post? Was it short? Bulleted? Formatted well? Had lots of pictures? Did you pimp those posts?
Visit me @ http://www.momontherun.net
December 29th, 2008 at 4:05 pm
how do you drive traffic and engagement on your blog? I am looking for input http://twurl.nl/kwbl1w -it is one of my new year’s resolutions!
January 7th, 2009 at 11:57 am
[...] comers, and watch next week for my Google Analytics Series for Bloggers. Also, take a peak at my “learnings” from my analytics a little while [...]
January 20th, 2009 at 9:09 am
Thanks for sharing the lessons. I am starting a travelogue type of blog and I am stumbling with length, partly due because my style of writing is more personal and I seem to have a lot to share… I had begun segmenting the blog entry with formatting and a thumbnail pic here and there but it is still a mystery at this very early stage what is driving visits and what people actually are reading vs. landing on. So far though, the stats tell do give me a sense of where demand is in terms of places to write about and that, at least, is a great clue to have.