So you have a great engineering blog – or so you think. But how do you actually measure an engineering blog’s success, and why should you?
Data-driven analysis is critical in the content marketing world. Like in any other part of your business, how effective your engineering blog truly is can only be evaluated if you choose reasonable goalposts and use them to make your decisions.
But before I go into how you can measure your engineering blog’s success, make sure you have access to some analytics tools. Luckily, native tools like Google Analytics or social media insights are usually quite good, so these will help give you some of the metrics you need to see how your website (or socials) are performing.
So let’s dive into ways of measuring the success of your engineering blog.
1. Website views
As the name suggests, views refer to how often a certain page on a website is viewed.
In GA4 (the newer version of Google Analytics, an upgrade – or, rather, complete revamp – of Universal Analytics), the views metric combines both mobile and desktop views, which is super handy to give you an overall indication of how well a specific page is doing.
In order to rake up views, it doesn’t really matter how people came to the page in question – it could be through organic search results, a direct hit, or perhaps even a link on social media or in an email newsletter. But what does matter is that they made it to your page.
Of course, the higher the page view figure, the better your page is performing. It suggests that your content is popular.
How can you ensure you get loads of page views?
Here are some tips to keep in mind whenever you’re producing content:
- Always create high-quality blog posts that are fully SEOed so they have the best chance of ranking
- Focus on evergreen content that’ll be relevant for a longer period of time
- Provide a great user experience (the design of your site and blog has to be on point)
- Add a sidebar to your blog that pushes other relevant content, but be careful about coming across as too spammy
- Promote your posts consistently on social media or in email campaigns
The nice thing about an analytics tool like GA4 is that you can run comparative data.
So, say you noticed your pageviews on a post are quite low, and you then planned a post optimization. You can then track your pageviews pre-update in comparison to post-update to see what type of effect the optimization work you did had on your pageviews.
This gives you a better indication of how your work is paying off.
2. Returning visitors
Returning visitors are users who visit your site repeatedly – this suggests that the content you’re putting out is interesting enough for them to come back and read what you have to say over and over again.
This is great news.
You can track returning visitors in GA4, but also keep an eye on the people who interact with your post or social media platforms a lot. Are you noticing a particular person or multiple people who are quite interactive and comment on or share your content? This is a good indication that your content is really speaking to them.
The best way to encourage returning visitors to your website is by consistently publishing new content. There’s no ideal number for how often you should be posting, but some consistent schedule will help your readers know when to come back for more.
You can also encourage returning visitors by working on an email newsletter that announces new posts, sharing new posts on social media, or even organizing a customer loyalty program that encourages visitors to come back to your site again and again.
3. Blog and social comments
I’d highly encourage you to enable comments on your engineering blogs. While you may need to spend a bit of time filtering out spam content, it’s a great way to create a community feel and give your readers the chance to chat with you directly.
Comments on both your blog and your social media posts are also a great indication of how well your content is speaking to your audience, and it does wonders at creating a loyal and trusted readership.
You may even get some insights into your client base and come up with great new content ideas!
Just ensure you keep an eye on your comments sections so you can weed out the spam, reply to compliments, and deal with any grievances as quickly as possible.
4. Social shares
If people are loving your content, they’ll likely want to share it with their peers. So, social shares are another good indicator of your engineering blog’s success.
You can track social shares through your analytics tools, but also keep an eye on the social shares you’re getting directly on social media platforms. This will give you a good indication of your social marketing success.
In order to drive up shares, focus on creating content that’s easily shareable, and don’t forget to include social share buttons on your blog. Also, check out my guide on increasing social shares on your blog for more info.
That said, don’t rely on this metric alone – after all, much engineering content is in-depth and technical, and your audience may enjoy reading it but won’t always feel the need to share.
5. Conversions
There are a number of conversion rates to pay attention to, though I’d recommend looking at the following to start:
- How many people reading your blogs are signing up for your newsletter?
- How many readers are reaching out to you directly?
- How many become customers?
These will obviously all happen at different stages of the buyer’s journey, but the important part is that you want to see how many people are turning from mere visitors to leads.
Some of the ways you can encourage lead generation are by including a newsletter sign-up pop-up or a field in the sidebar, adding prominent CTAs or Contact Us buttons, including a live chat feature, and ensuring that your blog is as free from other distractions as possible.
6. Email subscribers
Your email database is invaluable. After all, these are people who trust you as a brand enough to want to be kept in the loop about what your business is up to and which new content pieces you’re putting out there.
Email newsletters can be used to share new blog posts, announce product launches, offer discounts, or even just to send seasonal or holiday messages.
You can track how your email campaigns are performing – including open rates and specific click-throughs – in your email management platform.
Why is measuring your engineering blog’s success important?
If you’ve started out with a great content strategy and have set yourself some great goals, you’re already well on your way to achieving content marketing success.
But how would you really know this if you don’t spend some time analyzing the data?
After all, your efforts could be falling flat.
So, by paying attention to certain metrics, you’ll be able to better understand whether or not you’re actually on your way to achieving your goals – and have the chance to adjust course if you’re not.
If you need help with your engineering content, don’t hesitate to drop me a line. I’d be happy to assist.
Engineering Blog's Success FAQs
It makes sense to pay for a subscription to powerful tools like Ahrefs or Semrush, which can help you analyze your data and also plan your content. But many of the best tools are the native ones, and these are completely free. For your website, for example, you’ll get all the info you need directly from Google Analytics and Google Search Console.
By measuring metrics like pageviews, time spent on a page, social shares, and comments, you’ll get some indication of whether or not your content is coming across well. After all, someone wouldn’t spend a significant amount of time reading an in-depth article if they didn’t actually think what you’re providing was valuable.
All website traffic is good, of course, but you really want to pay attention to the engagement rate of your visitors. After all, if someone lands on your site but immediately bounces off again, that visit won’t be all too valuable. But if someone lands on your site and spends a significant amount of time engaging with your content, that visitor will be much more likely to turn into a potential client further down the line.
The better your content is, the more you’re likely to see audience growth. This is especially true for things like social media followers or newsletter subscribers, since it means you’re keeping people engaged over a longer period of time. Of course, always pay attention to actual engagement rates. Having a large social audience or subscriber base, for example, won’t help you much if no one is opening your emails or viewing your posts.
