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.

1. 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.
2. 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.
3. 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).
4. 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.
5. 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.

In this post, instead of talking about specific reports that will help track a department or unit Intranet, I will be focusing on how Intranets differ from most public-facing websites and how you look at your analytics will also be different.

Department Intranets are very different from your public-facing sites. For one thing, most of them are behind some type of authentication, which can add some complexity. Some intranets may also include AJAX or other types of technology that are not the standard static html pages.

This particular topic, analytics and web 2.0 applications, has been a source of much debate in the analytics industry. This is one reason why it’s important to put every type of analysis you do on a website into context. So, for instance, page views mean nothing with AJAX because the entire page doesn’t change. So page views would be useless in this instance. There are more arguments about page views, but that’s another post for another day.

Because Intranets vary so much, it is essential that you write down the goal of your Intranet. Again, I’m beating a dead horse here, but it’s crucial. Your Intranet goals should be easier because you *are* the user! If the Intranet is for your department or unit, you should have no problem getting usability testers, survey responses, and other feedback.

I’ve been involved with some Intranet projects and I know that a lot of times one goal of the Intranet might be to take the place of company-wide announcement or “news” type internal emails. This is an easy thing to track. Are those announcements getting traffic? Do you make your *important* news more prominent than your *nice-to-know* news? If so, does that seem to make a difference in your traffic to those pages?

Segmenting on technology is also useful. Do you know the technology that your internal users are using? Unless your the IT department, probably not. Segment your analytics by browser type, flash version, OS, resolution. Have you developed a Flash movie that needs player 9.0? Are you sure you’re users are all running 9.0? Do your pages behave differently in different browsers? Again, take it into context. Are all your users on Macs using Safari or Firefox? Or, do all your users have access to Firefox? Then perhaps designing/developing with Internet Explorer in mind might not be a priority.

This is one point where your external site and your internal Intranet differ greatly. In my opinion, especially if you have a smaller number of users (0 – 500), you *should* make sure your Intranet works on all your users machines. In a previous post, I harp on designing for the majority, knowing there will be a minority of users out there who might have problems veiwing your website. This is the exception. WIth your Intranet, all your users should be able to use it.

Another great use is to see if certain *new* applications or technologies (say, your spiffy new widgets) are actually getting used. Are they too new? Do users understand how to use them? Using analytics you can get an idea if you might need to do a little user training.

Obviously you can use analytics for your Intranet a lot of the same ways you use them on your public-facing sites. First develop your website goals and build your analytics strategy around those. There should be different *rules* for your Intranet, though, and those should be kept in mind at all times.