Kevin Hillstrom at Mine That Data has penned a numbers-crunching piece in Fully Understanding the Traffic Your Site Truly Generates.
Using BlogJuice as a measuring stick, Kevin notices trends, strengths and potential weaknesses in areas of loyalty through RSS subscriptions, popularity, and visits to the actual site.
The important part – the money quote, if you will:
"…you will have to find ways to measure the effectiveness of your website activities in ways that traditional analytics tools are currently incapable of doing. You will have to measure those who consume information via RSS feeds."
Kevin nails it with that line, which is why I always suggest using FeedBurners Total Stats PRO, especially with their still-coming-soon rollout of BlogBeat-like measurement.
BlogJuice is a decent comparison tool when using publicly available data. Still, there’s more to track.
For instance, Bloglines only represents 10% of total subscribers on this site. And while tracking subscribers is important, don’t forget to analyze reach or click-through of feed readers who don’t visit the site.
I’m still working on the Blogarithmics project for 2007, looking for a way to internally measure the path of improvement for customers we serve. Hope to have a working model in a couple of weeks so you folks can find the holes.
Aside: Kevin also has a great article at DMNews on Four Reasons Why Your Company Should Blog Next Year.
Follow Mike Sansone on Twitter or Facebook or on Google+
Find Your Social Media ROI
I hear it from a lot of business owners: “Where is the ROI with all this Social Media?“ If this is a question you ask yourself, maybe we should work together a bit more. We can work together solo, or via a professional learning community. Find and increase your ROI. There is a “there” there.
