Using your business blog as part of your website marketing strategy is one of the most powerful ways you can draw more traffic and generate prospective leads. But sometimes knowing what content KPIs to set and how to track them can be, well, a headache at best!

In this guide, I will be showing you the blog content KPIs I track for my clients and more importantly where you can find them!

Ok, 34 sounds like a lot and depending on your business and your marketing goals you might not feel all of these content KPIs are necessary to start with, or detailed enough for deeper strategies. So by all means take what I give you as a starting block and create your own bad-ass data collection tool!

I use a spreadsheet and keep it simple, so I can see pattern changes easily. This makes pivoting content plans and switching out pieces in my editorial calendar much easier.

You’ll want to collect your data monthly, I think weekly is far too much information to highlight trends and I don’t want you to get so bogged down in data you miss seeing the bigger picture.

Let’s start with the basics. What do you need to track monthly to establish how well your business blog is doing?

Most of these can be found using your Google Analytics 4 dashboard, under Reports (not made the switch from Universal Analytics to GA4 yet? Let me show you how to do that here.) Some may come from your customer relationship management system (CRM), your preferred SEO tool (Ahrefs, Moz, SemRush, or Ubersuggest) or your website dashboard.

• Total blog visits (GA4) - What we want to know here is how many visits the blog itself is getting month to month. Great for spotting increases quickly! A little deeper work will help establish where increases came from and what content they consumed during that visit. Over the course of the year, this information will also tell you when your peak months are, which may affect your editorial calendar planning.

• Blog home page visits (GA4) - It’s great to know if your blog home page is a destination for your visitors and a gateway to further user engagement. It may affect your decision to update the look and feel of this page to see how it impacts scrolls and clicks (or as we call them in analytics, ‘events’).

• Users vs New users (GA4) - What is the percentage breakdown each month? Is your blog helping to reach new people, or is it better at nurturing existing visitors? Neither is a ‘wrong’ answer, but depending on what your business KPIs are, understanding how your content is performing is key to establishing effective change.

• Average engagement time (also known as Average Session Duration on UA)  - Engaging our readers over a longer time is important when it comes to blog writing, but across industries, the average engagement time is somewhere in the region of 54s to 5m 1s. According to ContentSquare a good benchmark to aim for would be around 2-3 minutes. GA4 will help you establish what your average time is.

• Number of posts published (website) - This will help us see where our content efforts are increasing, particularly by aligning the number of posts with other key measurements, like overall traffic increases.

• Top viewed posts (GA4) - Naturally, we will want to see which posts are performing well with our audience and how this changes over time. It can lead to new content ideas for our editorial calendar. Or it could mean realigning our efforts if these topics no longer relate to the business direction, which can happen over the years.

• Average views per post (GA4) - If you need to understand how blogs help build traffic to your site, or you want to know if the frequency of posting affects visits, then this is a metric to keep tabs on. As a content specialist, it would be my job to look at this data over time and try to improve it by updating older posts to gain more SERPs or promoting older pieces by repurposing content and providing fresh links on socials and email marketing campaigns.

• Average inbound links per post (SEO tool) - If your blog content is worth linking to it will show up here. This metric is great for organic backlink growth as well as some targeted outreach campaigns, especially if your guest post links directly to a blog post (like a guide or something).

• Average comments per post (website) - Regular and credible comments are incredibly rare these days and most blog owners choose not to allow comments on their website, making this metric obsolete. But if you are getting comments beyond SPAM, then it does indicate audience engagement, which is worth noting. Especially true if you can track a comment through to a conversion, something I have seen happen.

• Average social shares per post (SEO tool, or 3rd party app, like BuzzSumo) - In my opinion, social share metrics don’t mean a whole lot on their own unless the data is clean (i.e. you haven’t been using the share feature to post the content to your own channels) and you can track it through to social content that has performed well and driven traffic back to your site. I mean tracking engagement that takes people off-site, doesn’t really do anything for you, does it? But if we put vanity aside it might help us to understand which topics perform well on social media in our audience's eyes and of course which channels they favour sharing them to. This might also help you create fresh social tactics that gain traction.

• Total RSS subscribers (website) - These guys make up part of your audience count, so take a look past the vanity figure and dig deep into how many are active subscribers if you can. These are returning visitors and what they regularly read will be helpful fodder for your editorial calendar.

• Email subscriber increases from blog posts (CRM) - If you run a CRM that allows you to create multiple sign-up widgets, then this is a great way to gain signups within a blog post. It could be by giving away a valuable opt-in offer (download, white paper, etc), or it could just be via a plain old signup box. Tracking your conversions from blog posts can help you establish which content and opt-ins perform well in conversions, as well as giving you a subscriber to market to later on (a great conversion metric for ROI).

• Top 3 countries by traffic (GA4) - Understanding demographics helps you establish colloquialisms in your text, both what to use and what to avoid. It can also help you understand if you are capturing your desired audience, or if you need some deeper regional SEO.

• Traffic sources (GA4) - Your content marketer will want to know where your traffic comes from. Is it social media, or mostly from Google? What's the mix? You could dig even deeper through your analytics here to see what else you can find out. For example, is social traffic more interested in opinion or news pieces? Referrals and their behaviours are also useful to track, especially if you are working on outreach campaigns.

Once I have my general spreadsheet set up and giving me insights through my data collection it’s time to start digging deep into individual posts. Depending on the size of your team, your budget and your content strategies, you may want to focus on your top-performing posts across the year. If you have the time and budget then ideally you’d track every single post you publish. No, don’t say “urgh!” Honestly, this level of detail is really helpful!

• Optimisation - Understanding how your individual blog post is performing overall, gives you a clearer idea as to how a piece needs updating to gain more traffic. For these metrics, you will need your preferred SEO tool, plus Google Analytics.

  • SERP rank changes over time vs. post keywords - What SERP page position are you tracking each month? Are you on page one? If not then you need to decide if you update, or create a fresh content piece to capitalise on your chosen keywords (that’s before you think about tactics like content silos, or topic clusters). To help highlight what I’m trying to track I usually note my keywords on my insights spreadsheet, alongside the data collection cells for individual posts.

  • Number of backlinks - How shareable and authoritative are my blog posts?

  • Number of shares - Track where you are getting the most shares (see above).

  • Number of comments - As we know comments may be an unnecessary metric for you to track, but it is worth noting that looking at individual posts can also be helpful in understanding audience popularity and if your content is leaving more questions than it is answering. That’s not always a bad thing to have questions, because you can always update a post to include more valuable information later on. Replying to comments also shows your expertise and approachability as a business, building trust.

  • Number of views - How many people are landing on your post?

  • Exit rate - Bounce rate is being replaced by exit rate on GA4. Bounce rates only tracked sessions that started and ended with the same page and so didn’t take into account views that came from other parts of your site. Exit rates now include this by looking at sessions that ended on that page. This allows you to track this information back and see where viewers came from. If you internally linked to the blog in question via another post or page and your viewer exited after landing there, maybe there’s a question of relevancy. Or maybe it's something else.

  • Users vs New users - Just as with your blog overall, this metric can be interesting to track on individual blog posts.

• Engagement - Tracking how people interact with your individual content pieces is as important as tracking the blog overall. It shows you how performance is playing out, giving you ideas for change.

  • Average engagement time - See ‘general content KPIs’ above.

  • Scrolls - Scrolls indicate the first time a user moves through your blog page to the end, or with 90% visible, according to Google. This is very interesting when comparing longer or shorter form posts, or topics. There’s also a chance you could improve this by relevant internal linking and increasing backlinks, by laying out your content for a better user experience or more conversions, or even by adding more value to your content.

  • Event count - This is where a page visitor takes a distinctive action that leads to a secondary engagement. It could be a click on a call to action (CTA) button, loading a second page, or completing a purchase. Perfect to track for more transactional-based blog content (purchase or sign-up based). You should be able to follow this lead on through your CRM or eCommerce dashboard.

  • Conversions and conversion rate - If you are tracking events in GA4, then you may only need a conversion rate data point, which is a percentage-based figure. This is great for showing your boss, or sales team content ROI for current and future investments.

• Acquisitions - Just as you track traffic sources in your general insights, breaking this down further for individual posts can be extremely useful.

  • Number of direct acquisitions - How many people came to your blog post via a link they had?

  • Number of organic search acquisitions - How many people came to your blog post via a search engine?

  • Number of organic social acquisitions - How many people came to your blog post via social media?

  • Number of organic video acquisitions - How many people came to your blog post via a video site or video medium? As we know audiences love video these days and so Google is sharing more about this type of interaction. Something to pay attention to as and when you want to create video ads.

  • Number of referral acquisitions - How many people came to your blog post via another site?

  • Number of unassigned acquisitions - Those people whose arrival is unaccounted for.

As a business owner, one of your biggest areas of interest in how your blog content is performing is how many potential leads it generates and if these become sales in the end. All of these you will want to track across your CRM and eCommerce platforms.

• Your CTAs - Calls to action are an incredibly important thing to track across your whole blog and individual blog posts because this is where you can see visitors becoming leads. You can use tracking codes right through your CRM to establish how email signups play out or if leads become sales. You can also use this same information to A/B test your triggers.

• New leads from blogs - How is blogging helping you gain more leads? Don’t forget this could include email signups if your content doesn’t have a purchase CTA. In which case you could (and should) go on to track retention rates and behaviour for those subscribers to give you conversion data.

• New sales from blog posts - How is blogging helping you gain income directly?

• Lead sources - Where are these leads coming from? Can you track that back? It might be other pages on site, including other blog posts, or from somewhere else (GA4 will help with some of this).

• Top lead gen posts - Which posts are giving you the most leads across your content portfolio?

• Average conversion rates - consider your CTAs and if you have several, then you will need to log these separately looking at visitors vs. conversion numbers.

Of course, it is important to remember here what balance of content types you have on your blog. If you are more informational than transactional, then financial ROI can be more difficult to gauge by looking at your content plan overall. That doesn’t mean you need to change tactics though and make all of your posts about securing more sales. In my experience, these rarely do as well as your informational content. Instead, you’d probably want to look at audience growth over sales, which you can quantify through stats on returning visitors, RSS and email subscriber counts.

You’ll be very aware at this stage that the content KPIs you choose to track for your business blog will vary from someone else. I believe that is a fair assessment. In my experience, I start with the basics and add in, or swap KPIs based on the business client I am serving and their business goals. 

You’ll also want to account for the budget and size of your content project. If your project is a smaller part of your overall marketing plan and not the focus, then you could scale back on the number of insights you track. Likewise, if you have the team capacity and budget why not go all in?! Blog content is, in my opinion, hands down the best way to drive traffic to your business website.

Metrics, data, insights, whatever you want to call them are crucial for helping you understand the performance of your content marketing. They need to be quantifiable and not vanity driven. They need to be showing you something of value. More than this, they need to be qualitative too, helping you to understand visitor and audience behaviour.

If you need a copywriter to create compelling copy, someone who understands how to reach your target customer, fill in the project brief form below!