Corporate Blogging: Ignore Your Metrics
I’ve had clients and internal stakeholders ask me some pretty detailed questions about their corporate blog performance. They’ve wanted to know why their bounce rates are so high, why they aren’t getting more traffic from search engines and why the pageviews-to-visit ratio is so low.
In some cases, these are valid questions to ask about a corporate blog, but generally, they are pretty close to irrelevant. When you launch a corporate blog – either to market your company or provide information or support to existing customers – you need to focus on the right metrics.
Especially for corporate bloggers who either consume mass media blog content regularly (or who got their starts writing for independent mass market blogs), it’s natural to use the metrics that have become accepted in those venues.
Unique visitors, pageviews and stickiness measures directly indicate the performance of blogs like Technorati and Gadling because of the underlying business model.
However, they don’t speak directly to the success of your corporate blog. The reason for this is pretty simple: traffic does not directly drive revenue for your organization. It may contribute to sales possibilities down the road, but it doesn’t offer a straight connection, particularly in the B2B space.
For most B2B companies, a corporate blog is most effective as a way to communicate the company message, reinforce the brand and provide the sales force with an important tool in market outreach and sales lead cultivation. On the back end, the analytics offer intelligence that can be used to inform business development teams throughout the sales cycle. These features are useful and important, but they are supportive of the existing sales process – they do not indicate direct sales impact.
So, you need to focus on the metrics that speak to the effectiveness of your corporate blog as a sales tool, rather than its success in raw audience acquisition and retention. Identifying the right metrics and calculating them isn’t as simple as opening up Google Analytics and poking around for data, but it will deliver the insights you need to make your social media marketing program more powerful.
Continued on the next page
Follow Technorati