How do you know your blog is doing well? Blog management experts will tell you that it depends on what you want your blog to achieve. Do you want it to boost search engine visibility for your website? Establish yourself as an industry thought leader? Foster customer engagement?

Whether you’re aiming for only one or all of these goals, there are established metrics that will help you gauge your blog’s performance.

Page views

Page views refer to every instance your blog is loaded on a browser: a sure sign people are coming to see your post. Considering the Internet’s level of saturation today, that scenario is preferable to having no one find it at all.

Page views are the first indicator of blog performance. Yet while they are a basic metric, interpreting them isn’t so simple. You could gain hundreds and hundreds of this statistic and have them mean nothing for your goals.

Time on site and bounce rate

Page views matter in quality, not quantity. One way to assess their quality is to look at the average time people spend on your blog. If they stayed for only four seconds, that could mean they only scrolled through a post. Staying for a couple minutes suggests they have scanned or read it in its entirety.

The 2018 E-Commerce Benchmark KPI study notes that a person spends three minutes and 18 seconds on a retail page. That’s enough time for someone to scout and retain information about products, as well as read and react to a short, well-crafted blog post.

Bounce rate is a related metric that measures the percentage of people who leave a site after viewing a single page. If you want a blog post to lead readers to parts of your website that sell products and services, a high bounce rate might be cause for concern. If you only want a post to raise awareness of your brand, a low bounce rate might be less significant.

Visits and inbound links

Page views are different from visits, which Hubspot defines as the instances people reach your website through external sources. These can include any kind of inbound link that another website—like a different blog or a search engine—creates to direct people to yours. One visit can consist of several page views.

The distinction is important because visits and inbound links tell you how you’re getting viewed.

If your goal is to rank higher on search engine results, you want to know whether Google has begun recommending you. If your aim is to become an industry authority, it counts to your success if people are reading your posts because of links from prestigious publications and industry peers.

Leads and conversions

For all the times people go to your blog and the time they spend on it, does your blog help you identify leads? Leads are prospective customers who may make themselves known by leaving comments, following you for updates, signing up for your feed, or sharing your posts.

Does your blog help you successfully pursue and convert them into paying customers and even loyal clients?

Ultimately, leads and conversion are the two metrics that will decide whether your blog is succeeding in serving your business. They’re the ones that most concern you and your bottom line. The rest are building blocks you should familiarize yourself with and ask a content marketing agency to interpret and develop for you.