If you already have a blog, you will want to know if it is developing well. Because if it’s a (part-time) professional project, you need metrics for bloggers to measure your success and identify potential. But even if your blog is just a private or hobby project, measurable numbers and values can be useful. Because tracking the growth of a blog can be extremely motivating. So that you have the most important key figures for bloggers in the future on the screen, we want to introduce them to you in this short article. – Now we wish you a lot of fun reading the article!

In this blog article, we’ll shortly introduce you to all the important metrics for bloggers: starting with traffic sources and traffic metrics and ending with user behavior and page report in Google Analytics.

How can you measure the metrics for your blog?

Most bloggers use the free Google Analytics tool to measure their metrics. Of course, there are other digital analytics tools for measuring key metrics for bloggers. But Google Analytics already offers countless metrics and features, making it ideal for both personal and professional blog projects. In our knowledge base, we explain how to enable Google Analytics in SiteDesigner as well as how to add Google Analytics in ShopDesigner.

What types of metrics for bloggers are there anyway?

However, in order for you to better understand the various metrics in Google Analytics, we will now shortly explain them to you. However, since Google Analytics provides countless data, we want to limit ourselves here only to the really important key figures for bloggers. You can find some interesting information in the Page Report, for example, which is therefore also very worth reading.

But basically we differentiate between three types of key figures. While on the one hand we have the visitor numbers or traffic metrics, on the other hand there are the user metrics for user behavior. In addition, there are the acquisition metrics with the traffic sources, i.e. the visitor sources, with which we now want to start:

Acquisition metrics for blogs

With the help of the acquisition metrics, you can find out the traffic sources. This means that Google Analytics shows you exactly how many visitors come to your blog via which channels. For many blogs, most visitors come via organic search in search engines (Organic Search) and via direct hits (Direct) as well as via links, either on other blogs and websites (Referral) or via social networks (Social). If you want to advertise your blog, paid ads on Google (Paid Search) or banner ads on the Internet (Display) can also be important sources of access. Similarly, if you do email marketing and link your blog in emails or newsletters (Email). Other channels, such as RSS feeds and the like, are listed under Other.

The traffic sources show you through which channels users come to your blog – mostly through organic search, direct hits, links or social networks.

Traffic metrics for blogs

The traffic metrics are also divided into three individual important metrics for bloggers. The first is the page impressions, which indicate the number of pages called up. However, since every click on your blog or a subpage is counted as a call, you should always put the page impressions in relation to other key figures.

One of them are the visits/sessions, which indicate the number of visitors to your blog. A session includes all activities of a visitor. Accordingly, the corresponding data for sessions are interesting, such as the session duration, which indicates how long a visitor stays on your blog on average.

Equally interesting are the users (unique visitors), where each assignable user is counted only once. While a user is counted many times for the number of visitors, he is counted only once for this important key figure for bloggers. As soon as a user visits your blog for the first time, he is created as a new user (New Visitor) and provided with a cookie or an anonymous ID. If he then comes back and visits your blog several times, he is counted as a returning visitor.

User metrics for blogs

The user metrics are again divided into three important metrics for bloggers. These provide information about how well the visitors like your blog. For example, the Pages per Session metric shows you the average number of pages a visitor has viewed per session. With the help of links to related posts, you can increase this important metric for bloggers, for example.

But also the average session duration is one of these important metrics for bloggers. It indicates how long a visitor stays on your blog on average. The higher the average session duration, the better and more interesting visitors are likely to find the content of your blog.

The bounce rate is also very interesting for bloggers, as it can draw attention to important problems. This is because the bounce rate is calculated by dividing visitors who visited only one page by all sessions. A high bounce rate of well over 50 percent can be due to many things. Among other things, a too long loading time, irrelevant content or a deterrent web design of your blog.

Having just looked at the traffic metrics and user metrics for blogs, let’s now take a look at the Page Report from Google Analytics.

Page Report from Google Analytics

To conclude our short article about the most important key figures for bloggers, we would like to mention the Page Report from Google Analytics. Because this is always worth a look. It shows exactly which of your pages and posts are called up the most by visitors. Thus, you can analyze your blog and find out which content is well received.

However, you should always consider the key figures in the Page Report of Google Analytics, as well as the other important key figures for bloggers, in relation. Because the key figures in the page report are always related to how long a subpage or a blog article has been online. The best thing to do is to experiment a bit. Check Google Analytics again and again for the most important key figures for bloggers to optimize your blog step by step. – Have fun with it!