Blogarithmics: How Do We Measure Blogs?

By on November 18, 2006 in Blogging, RSS Feeds with 13 Comments

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about how we can measure blog efforts for our customers. I recall a thought shared last year by Mary Hodder on this subject, but did someone find a measurement?

I’d like to analyze the efforts of our customers using the following items in a weighted formula (listed randomly here):

  • Number of posts
  • Number of incoming comments
  • Number of author’s comments elsewhere
  • Technorati rank
  • Alexa Rank
  • Google Page Rank
  • MyBlogLog community additions
  • Outbound Links
  • Outbound Clickthrough
  • Incoming Referral Links from blogs
  • Incoming Referral Links from search engines
  • Feed Subscribers
  • Feed Reach
  • Feed Clickthrough

There are probably other items (del.icio.us history, digg/reddit/stumble/etc. links, what else?). Maybe we need a sabermetrician here.

If there’s a tool or conversation about this, let me know. If not, let’s start one.

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  • http://www.rushonbusiness.com Rush Nigut

    I love the book Management by Baseball! Effective baseball analysts know what to value and what to ignore. According to the book there are four ways to improve player performance. 1. Experimentation. 2. OMA – Observe, Measure, Analyze, 3. Applying – take the lessons learned from OMA and implement them to maximize effectiveness 4. Coaching – preparing individuals to become better along with motivation and training.
    Sounds like it might work for blogs. Of course, baseball is life.

  • http://chriscree.net/ Chris Cree

    Don’t forget to weigh in page views and unique site visitors!

  • http://www.brainbasedbusiness.com Ellen Weber

    Thanks for compiling the interesting list Mike. How about repeat visitors and length of stay?

  • http://makingamark.blogspot.com Katherine Tyrrell

    I measure mine by the number of people who comment that they enjoy my blog and/or use read my blog to find things out.
    I do take a look at my stats on a daily basis and my technorati ranking on a weekly basis (if I can ever remember when they update it!) and I do enjoy looking at all the locations of my readers on clustr map and mapstats icon. Oh – and I have the number of feed subscribers in icons just below may map stuff which makes it easy to keep an eye on things.
    But since all the numbers are different I don’t get too excited by them – it’s the comments that make the difference to me!

  • http://www.converstations.com Mike Sansone

    > Rush, great input. We’ll keep that outline front-and-center as we test some number crunches. Thanks, coach!
    >Good additions, Chris – can’t forget those.
    >Ditto, Ellen. Can we clearly define some sections? Frequency, Popularity, Loyalty, Engagement…
    >Katherine! Great point about the comments. Engagement should be heavily weighted in this exercise. Thanks for your insight and engagement:-)

  • http://twopointouch.com Ian Delaney

    I’m anxious about ‘blogarythmics’ that base the success of a blog on its popularity. If I only have one reader, but that reader is Tony Blair, then I think that I’ve probably done a good job.
    However, at the same time, that sort of thing is very hard to measure. Unlesss Tony left a lot of comments and came back several times a day, how could I prove its influence and engagement levels?
    Sorry – I’m throwing the question back at you, but I’m just not convinced that the metrics you give here are helpful when it comes to a very niche area.

  • http://www.converstations.com Mike Sansone

    Ian, my hope is that we can find a measurement to assist in improvement rather than to determine a rank.
    If a business blog has X number of posts and X number of comments per week is that productive? And if we bump it up to Y on both accounts, does anything change? What of outbound and incoming links? More? Less?
    If I’m reading you right, measuring popularity is a small part of the measurement – because we don’t know the influence on the readership side, yes?

  • http://twopointouch.com Ian Delaney

    You are right – more of these things is definitely better in most regards. But I guess my point was – what about if you are adding the wrong type of audience? What if your, say, design blog is only read by thousands of rival designers, but no customers? We need to know more about *who* reads and subscribes before we can assign it value. And for that designer, the ROI would amount to getting more custom.

  • http://successfromthenest.com Tony D. Clark

    I agree with you on the performance factor. What determines performance? I think knowing the overall goal for the blog can really help that. Unlike blogs that are in the “making money FROM” group, business blogs tend to fall into the “making money BECAUSE” group. That may require a different set of metrics, namely hitting specific goals.
    If you have 30 subscribers and an average of 70 unique visitors a day, but that equates to some external goal that is measured as a hit, that may be better than 500 subscribers and 1000 visitors, but less external target hits. I’d love to work out some way of measuring that.
    Ian’s thoughts on WHO reads and subscribes is a great example of the types of things to include in this ideal measurement.
    Just using things like backlink rakings is so variable (Technorati is always a little squirrelly and Yahoo! Site Explorer is great, but kind of hard to slice and dice). A nice system of measuring blog traffic to real business goals would be much more valuable.
    But you know that better than I, Mike :)

  • http://www.blogchalktalk.com Easton Ellsworth

    Stowe Boyd started a big conversation about a “Conversational Index” earlier this year. You could mine that whole thread for thoughts too. I’m in!

  • http://successcreeations.com/2006/11/24/business-blogging-101-measuring-your-blogs-success/ SuccessCREEations

    Business Blogging 101 – Measuring Your Blogs Success

    So youve decided you really need to find out more about this whole blog phenomenon to try and decide if your business really needs a blog or not. (Hint: It does.) But you say learning all that new blogging stuff is a bit overwhelming?
    How can …

  • http://www.englishclass.com.tw 英文家教

    Insightful read. I have stumbled and twittered this for my friends. Others no doubt will like it like I did.

  • Pingback: Blogarithmics: EFLAP? What Stats Get Included? | ConverStations

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