Jan 05 2009
Measuring Student Blog Success
A couple weeks ago there was a brief conversation on Twitter about how to measure the success of student blogs. This is an interesting discussion because blogs are different than normal websites.
The goal for most blogs is interaction (on every single page, usually) – not so with traditional websites like your university website (again, usually). This makes measuring success and analytics for blogs a bit different. Looking at visitor rate, bounce rate, path analysis for blogs is either a waste of time or not enough. Let me explain.
To measure the true success of a blog, you need to go way beyond your regular analytics tool. It doesn’t matter what tool your using, you’ll have to look beyond it to truly find out how your student blog is doing.
I could stop here and say my usual speil about goals. Yes, it does depend on your blog goals, but most student blogs will have the same type of goals. Most blogs (whether they’re student blogs or not) want engagement … interaction … discussions. So, let’s move on.
Visitors. First, especially for new student blogs, measuring your visits and unique visitors will give you a great trend. Your goal is always to have that trend increase. This is more of an insight measurement, not an actionable measurement. It is important nonetheless.
Comments. To measure true engagement, looking at your comments is essential. Although it is true that most users will read the blog and *not* comment, since conversation is the goal of most blogs, measuring your comments is one direct measure of engagement. So, you can measure the number of comments/number of posts.
Be sure to not only measure the number of comments, but how many *new* users comment. It’s one thing to have 60 comments for a post, but if the comments are only from a select group of very engaged users, that doesn’t necessarily constitute *growth.* There is no argument that comments that add to the conversation (spam comments don’t count!) no matter if they are only from a select group of users are all valuable, but to truly grow, you want not only your core group of users comment, but you want to always be trying to get comments from other users as well.
Measure all comments: number of comments/number of posts
Measure new comments: number of new user comments/number of posts
I want to reiterate that all comments are valuable. There is no doubt about that. To truly grow, however, at some point you need to engage new users.
Tip for more engagement – If users comment on your blog, they are obviously engaged. Keep them interested in the post they commented on! How? If you use WordPress for your blogging platform, download and install the Subscribe to Comments plugin (thanks to Kyle James for suggesting this plugin way back when I started this blog). Not only does this plugin give users an easy way to come back to your blog to check out comments updates, it gives your blog an easy way to keep your commenting users interested in that post. It’s a win-win.
Subscribers. Another true measure of success. This is like a user on your university site filling out a form and signing up to receive program updates. They are asking for you to contact them!
If you don’t use it already, use FeedBurner.
Measuring visitors is important, but measuring subscribers (the users who are *asking* you to update them on your blog postings) is key.
Offsite mentions. This could also be “buzz.” How many times is your blog referred to or linked to from elsewhere? There are a lot of ways to measure this.
- Your blogging platform keeps track of trackbacks. How many times are other blogs mentioning your blog? This is another great way to measure success. Others are engaged and found something useful on your blog.
- Kick it old school. Go to Google and run a link search for your blog. Type in the search box, link:http:www.yoursite.com. You’ll see who is linking to your blog.
- Create a google alert for your blog name and maybe even the names of your student bloggers (obviously this will be easier if your student bloggers have unique names).
- Use Twitter search to find out who’s talking about your student blog on Twitter. Again, you can search for your blog name, your URL, your student blogger names, etc. You can even subscribe to a feed via RSS to keep you updated on conversations. If your blog URL is especially long, Twitter users may be using TinyURLs to refer to your site. Search for the URL anyway. You might be surprised.
- Rank on sharing sites. Is your blog mentioned and shared on Technorati, Digg, Delicious, etc.?
Bounce rate – may not be a great measurement for blogs. Bounce rate is measured by single page visits/entry pages. So, a bounce is when a user enters the site and exits the site from the same page without viewing any other pages within the site.
The problem with this measurement for blogs comes with RSS. When users subscribe to your blog via RSS, those users usually click from their feed reader to your blog post. The user reads the post (hopefully) and then, again, usually, exits from the same page. This would actually be measured as a bounce, even though the user may have read the entire post and even may have commented on the post.
There has been some discussion in web analytics circles about measuring bounce rate by time on site, especially for blogs. Initially this makes sense. Measuring bounce rate by number of page clearly doesn’t make much sense for blogs. Time seems to make sense. For those of you who have read this blog or other web analytics blogs in the past year or so, you know that it isn’t that simple.
Time on site has downfalls as well because of the way analytics tools calculate time on site.
Does this mean that bounce rate is a useless measurement for blogs? No. Remember that we want to look at trends. So, if your bounce rate is flawed, it’s going to be flawed the same throughout so trends are still useful. If your bounce rates go way down or way up, you should be looking more closely at potential reasons.
I’m sure there are many other measurements of student blog success. What are some measurements you use?
Thanks to @KarlynM and @kpmccusker for the conversation on Twitter and the idea for this post.
Are blogs different than normal websites? I would argue they aren’t. It’s just a different way to publish content. In order to get blogs accepted in mainstream higher ed, we need to step back and acknowledge that it’s really nothing more than a content management system.
I think the main problem with measuring success with these things is that people don’t start out with goals other than having student blogs. Without goals, there’s not really a way to quantify success. I would disagree with you that most blogs have the same goals – it’s just a communications medium. Again, we need to step back and at it in its barest form – any communications medium can have thousands of different uses depending on the overall business goals of the organization. In higher ed, there doesn’t seem to be that much difference because very few institutions have considered the goals of their blogs beyond “I want student blogs”.
Your commentary on the different styles of measurement is great and definitely something that anyone starting this sort of thing needs to consider.
Thanks for the comment, Karlyn.
I do think that blogs are different than websites, generally. While, yes, blog platforms are just content management systems, traditional websites are not built for conversation. With traditional websites today (again, generally), there is no back and forth. The content is posted and that’s it until there is an update, etc. Blog posts, however, because they are an open conversation, could technically go on forever. A blog post may never actually end.
To your point about acceptance in higher education, I think that traditional websites are slowly becoming more blog-like (as far as user-generated content is concerned). Higher education does need to start getting serious about blogs and user-generated content in general. Higher education is a little slower, as usual, with this trend, though.
I do agree that student blogs can have different goals and you’re absolutely right – without goals, how can you measure success? I also love your point that in higher education “there doesn’t seem to be that much difference because very few organizations have considered the goals of their blogs beyond, ‘I want student blogs.’” I hadn’t really thought about it that way, but you’re absolutely right.
My point with the paragraph about goals was solely that blogs are about conversation and buzz and measuring this will be about the same for most student blogs, at least for now.
Student blogs are really just a sub-section of your university website and will have their own goals, but should also contribute to the goals of the university site as a whole. I should have stated this within that paragraph.
My ONLY goal for our student/admissions blog: That authors create content weekly.
The rest will follow… and it’s super easy to measure.
That’s a result…not a goal
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