Get on blogging, chapter 6 – Comments, traffic and shares

31.07.2014 5 min read

Get on blogging is a weekly series about blogging and becoming a blogger. This chapter is all about measurements and analytics. How will you know if anyone reads your blog? What if nobody will comment? Are analytics telling you your blog is in trouble?

Some people are way too obsessed about the measurements of a blog. They check the visitors count and if there's no herd of readers coming to a blog every day the blog must be worthless. For a person like that lack of comments means the blog doesn't have any readers. That's all wrong.

Comments

Most people only read. They don't comment, they don't want to take part on the conversation, they don't even have their own blogs they would like to promote by commenting your posts. They are not any less important for your blog than the active, commenting type. Actually I think comments need to be treated as an extra, something that's not necessary part of a blog. In case you have the comments turned on, it's of course important to be happy about every and each one of them (unless they are hateful or otherwise bad type). But don't expect them and don't feel they are the main point of your blogging. See Seth Godin as an example. He is a well known blogger and gives lots of great and funny advice of blogging. Then why has he turned the commenting off? The reason is he feels comments are kind of a distraction, something he doesn't feel he needs. Seth doesn't tell everyone to turn their comments off and he welcomes them on other blogs. It's just not for him.

Lack of comments doesn't mean nobody cares and your blog is useless. It only means the people reading your blog posts didn't feel like commenting for a reason or another. It's not necessarily your fault, most likely they just didn't have the time or the effort to do so. It's good to notice that the rise of using web with mobile devices is also affecting the commenting: It can be really difficult to write and publish a comment with a smartphone.

A blog can have a huge readership but still very little comments. It depends on the content of the blog, the types of readers it lures and many other reasons. Thus comments are not a good measurement of how well a blog is "performing".

Analytics

There are plenty of different ways to measure the traffic and other stats of a website. Google Analytics is probably one of the most well known analytics service and I have also some experience with Quantcast, to mention some. Additionally your service may have installed some statistics tools on your hosting, such as AWStats or Webalizer. All these services and tools will give you an overview of the usage of your site. They aren't completely accurate. The accuracy of these different analytics services and tools has many different variables that may change their results. Have the visitors of your site blocked such tracking? Do they let their browser store cookies? Does the service or the tool take in account the returning visitors and how long does it take for one visitor to be counted as a new one? How are separate visitors counted? Because of this the analytics are always approximates and some visitors are never counted as such.

High bounce rate doesn't mean your site is in trouble. Actually bounce rate might mean something else than you think. Bounce rate counts the amount of people who viewed only one page of your site during their visit. Blogs have usually quite high bounce rate due to the fact that most people do come in and read only that latest post. Perhaps they are regulars and have already read all the other posts before. Or they found what they wanted and needed on that one post. You must remember that your readers have limited time and don't want to spend too much of it on one site. It's nothing personal and really doesn't tell anything about your blog.

The analytics give you an idea of what's going on with your readers. They however don't tell the whole story about the impact of your blog posts.

Shares

Other measurement of a blog's success are the social media shares. How often a post has been shared on different platforms? it's another one of those interesting things that you need not to get too deeply invested in. Shares of course do give an idea of how important your blog readers thought your posts are. But most people share content they don't really read which gives an interesting twist to measuring the impact by the shares. Some are sharing content by certain writer in order to gain their access and rub their success off on themselves. Some are sharing content because a certain person shared it before and thus it must be great. Some are sharing content based on it's title, which may be clever but not tell anything about the text itself. There are multitudes of reasons for a share and it's not always the fact that the content is worth it.

In addition to this it's a bit difficult to measure the shares. Some shares don't show on any measurements, due to many reasons. Old shares may not present themselves in calculations and if a person has set their social media profile as private or hidden the shares may not show on the counts depending on the privacy settings of a service. This makes using shares as a measurement of the impact and success of a blog and it's posts somewhat inaccurate.

Quality

I recommend looking beyond the numbers. Even if your analytics are showing high visits, people are sharing your posts all over the place and there are plenty of comments for each of them and especially if the numbers aren't great. Think about the quality of the shares and comments. Look where your blog visitors are in the world, see their age and gender, look how many of them visited more than one page and so forth.

Who is sharing the posts, why and how are they sharing them? What kind of comments are you getting? Are they well thought comments or are the commenters only promoting their own stuff? I get both. Some people are commenting to get traffic and links to their own sites, thinking comments are all about SEO. Most are commenting to ask me further questions or to add something to what I wrote. Those comments I really enjoy.

More important than the quantity of comments, visitors and shares is how your blog is working in general. Traffic is nothing if it doesn't help your business. Bounce rate is irrelevant if your content is well written and gives the readers what they need. Comments are fine, but they can be made without giving real thought to it. Don't drown in the numbers.

Next week's Get on blogging seeks alternative blogging ideas. Is writing unpleasant to you and would a video work better? How about doing something completely different? Can you draw, do you take photos or write smashing poetry?

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• Get on blogging, chapter 7 – Alternative means of expression
• Get on blogging, chapter 5 – Let it fly