How Do You Measure Success?

I’ve been thinking a lot about blog analytics and measuring progress and success. There are lots of measures and measurers (not a real word) out there and it can be consuming what stats to believe. Here’s what I look at (I’m excluding revenue and income and any other financial measures):

Blog Stats
RSS Subscribers
Email Signups
Email Subscribers
# of Comments

Ranks
Google Page Rank
Alexa Rank
Compete Rank
Quantcast Rank

Search Engines
Google Indexed Pages
Yahoo Inlinks
Bing Results

Social Media
Twitter Followers
# of ReTweets
Delicious Bookmarks
StumbleUpon articles
# of posts Dugg (Digg)

Google Analytics
Pageviews
Unique visitors
Pages per visit
Bounce rate
Top content
Top referrers

Plus there are other analytic services out there, like Woopra, PostRank, Clicky and WordPress.com stats. Some services like Klout focus on specific services (in this case Twitter). The list goes on and on.

How often do you check these stats? Daily, weekly, bi-weekly or monthly? It’s not easy to know what to follow, what is important and what to measure and even remember to keep track of it all. So how do you do it? I don’t know is the answer! Some people do it manually by simply remembering, some use spreadsheets, some get reports emailed to them, some have their assistants compile info for them, some have complicated systems involving gathering pieces of information ad-hoc and automatically from various places.

Most of us I guess just check them when we remember and have the time. Do you? What else do you measure? Ad-clicks? New acquaintances? Backlinks?

printing

However I do have a goal set up in Google Analytic for my contact page which helps in a small way. It's interesting you mention actually implementing the changes..

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landscape gold coast

Great post you have there. You said it straight to the point. I would consider all the five points to measure success of seo campaign.

Tej Kohli

there are one more thing, If You added adsense you must have to check impression and clicks

Joel Williams

Thanks Vlad, email is something I measure too but wanted to see if others sis, so perfect! It has to be done manually and I mainly do it from gut feel, however I do have a goal set up in Google Analytics for my contact page which helps in a small way. It's interesting you mention actually implementing the changes,/suggestions, I think some people forget or ignore that part!

Vlad

RSS and email subscribers are a good indicator of success but for me I also count how many e-mails I get from people who actually have questions about the content of my site...they try to implement the things I explain but have questions about their particular situation. This e-mail exchange is very important for me.

PST Recovery

It's a great way when you are increasing your newsletter or rss subscriber that mean you are growing for success.