How to Manage and Retain Traffic For Your Blog

“Traffic! Oh, I say again, more traffic!” Such is the battle cry from many who dare share a thought or two online with the blogosphere. Attaining more traffic can bring more opportunities to establish an engaged community of readers, essential for revenue for those who support blog costs via advertising, as well as increased stature online.

But like websites, blogs need good traffic quality for conversions — the actions in which visitors should undertake while on a given site. It may be more meaningful to have a few hundred visitors per week reach a designated goal such as a membership registration page or a purchase of an e-book than have thousands of visitors who are less engaged and whose volume can inadvertently create technical hosting problems for small blogs starting out. Plus having core readers may provide a better word of mouth.

I’ve thought about three steps that can help bloggers attract the relevant visitors they want to see their ads and read their articles. Developing a core audience is essential for branding and should be an essential consideration at the forefront of things-to-do for blog development.

First, set up measurements for traffic quality arriving to the blog

Bloggers can measure blog traffic through blog visits and blog subscribers. Blog visits can be tracked with a stat counter, while RSS feeds, which are new blog content updates sent to subscribers, provide the subscription numbers.

But stat counters only compute raw visits. Bloggers need the ability to distinguish the traffic sources and its preferences on the blog. That’s where segmentation comes in, a typical analytics tool feature. Segmentation is simply the breakdown of website traffic into distinguishable groups, allowing potential trends among the visitors to be more visible. This gives the blog owner (or team) information to adjust writing topics, to consider marketing to a specific geographic group, or to even justify a site redesign if a segment of readers are increasingly arriving to the site through mobile devices, all for starters.

One set of analytics tools that help segmentation are panel analytics, such as Compete and Quantcast. These sites offer an indication of psycho-graphics and demographics. Users type the website URL and see metrics based on an inference model (There are also Javascript tags available to tag the sites). The metrics include age demographics, male versus female traffic, and which sites traffic goes after time spent on the blog.

Next, find the traffic quality and segmentation on the blog

The analytics solutions are familiar ones to many website owners — Google Analytics, Yahoo! Web Analytics, Piwik, Omniture Site Catalysts, Webtrends, and others. Segmentation features are usually built in, and can be combined in numerous ways. For some basic starters, bloggers can examine the following segments (Names are based on Google Analytics but most analytics tools follow similar naming conventions):

New vs Returning Visitors — Bloggers can determine the success in gathering new visitors during first months of posting, then begin to monitor how well visitors are returning to the site.
Direct Traffic — indicates how recognizable the URL is (Visitors have to type the URL in to be considered direct, so this can be an indicator of site mindshare among visitors — how well visitors keep the blog in mind and seek it.
Referring Sites — indicates what sources has consistently sent visitors to the blog.  This can help understand what partnerships are successful and should be explored.
Keyword — Bloggers can learn which keywords drew visitors, leading to develop additional content around the successful words, as well as deciding what words should be incorporated more or less frequently into the text.

Bloggers should try a few combinations of segmentation features based on their online and offline marketing strategy for the blog. For example, if a blog has been promoted in the New York area through ads and speaking engagement by the blogger, a blogger can combine the Map Overlay feature in Google Analytics with direct traffic to gain an idea if New York appearances and offline efforts have potentially helped increase visitors mindshare (There are more direct ways to measure, but we’ll cover that in another post)

Third, seek metrics relevant to the blog goals

Once a segmentation feature is decided, bloggers should consider determining what actions lead to desired goals. Pageviews and average time on site (ATOS) can together indicate engagement, and are typically used in dashboards, although it is hard to attribute what specific content lead to time and pageviews gains. The kinds of metric considerations that may impact blog goals include:

Content Sharing — Understand how content is shared indicates consideration of that content
RSS Feeds — identify how many are subscribing to the site. This is useful alongside visitors in justifying eCPM rates to advertisers
Comments per posts — shows that the posts appeal to readers enough to add their commentary. This is a supporting engagement metrics, though analysis may be more manual than automatic giving the analytic solutions available at this writing.
Adsense Metrics – if a blog contains Adsense contextual ads and is using Google Analytics, metrics are available under the Content segment to show the number of ads served and click through rate, as well as means to identify pages and referring sources that best contributed to Adsense-sourced revenue.
Bounce Rates — Blog bounce rates are typically higher than average – 80-90% versus 30-50% range for a typical site. Instead of a bounce rate, bloggers should look at the percentage of exiting visitors at a specific page, although discovering points of reader disinterest can require drilling down into metrics and trafficstream funnels to find the exit points and rates.

A final word on improving traffic quality …remember the blogging basics!

When it’s said and done, remember that analytics cannot replace the effort goes into a blog — writing great content, acknowledging and engaging readers, and inviting guest bloggers. Instead, analytics aids those efforts by preventing wasted time on subjects that do not interest readers and focusing effort on understanding what worked well.