How to Use Analytics to Achieve Your Next Blog Article's Goals

Pamela Vaughan
Pamela Vaughan

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Published:

strategy We already know that blog analytics can be helpful in evaluating the performance of your blog, both overall and in individual blog articles, as well as in brainstorming new ideas for blog topics . But what about using analytics strategically to achieve the goals of a particular blog article?

Strategic bloggers know how to effectively use their business blogs to achieve specific goals. Maybe they want to promote a program, get people to click on a call-to-action (CTA) for a particular offer, or perhaps raise awareness about a certain industry topic. Each blog article should be crafted in a way that helps the blogger to achieve a goal, and blog analytics can provide valuable insight to help accomplish that.

Using Blog Analytics to Achieve an Article's Goals

1. Define Your Goal: When you sit down to write a blog article, first think about what you're trying to accomplish with that specific post. Sure, you ultimately want to engage your audience and provide useful information, but try to think more granularly. Is there a new feature in your products or services to which you'd like to draw attention? Did you just publish a new ebook that you want people to download? Before you start writing, think about the results you want to achieve with that article, and focus on those results.

2. Review Analytics From Past Blog Articles: This is where the data comes in. Let's say you want to write about an interesting industry topic, and you want to generate a lot discussion from your article. If your goal is to attract a lot of comments, look through your blog analytics and pinpoint articles that have generated a lot of comments in the past. Now compare them: Can you notice anything about these articles that helped contribute to a spike in comments? Maybe they were written in a certain style or presented the topic in a different way. Try to pick up on similarities or patterns.

Tip for HubSpot Customers: Using HubSpot's Blog Analytics , filter the data by clicking on a particular column (e.g. Click on the 'Comments' column to sort articles by the most -- or fewest -- comments.).

Blog analtyics comments resized 600

A similar process can be applied to other metrics such as inbound links or page views. Additionally, if your goal is to, say, generate a lot of conversions on a CTA (for example, to promote that ebook you recently published), evaluate past blog articles and hone in on those that generated a high conversion rate. What can you learn?

3. Apply What You've Learned: If you're able to pick up on specific patterns, trends, similarities, and lessons you think would help achieve the goal of your blog article, apply them! Use the insight you've gleaned when crafting your new blog article, and see if it improves your article's ability to generate the results you're going for!

How else have you used blog analytics to improve your company's blog?

Photo Credit: Kathryn Decker-Krauth


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