Promote. Grow. Monetize your sports blog.

That’s easy right?  More traffic = a more successful sports blog.  Well, not exactly.  Traffic is great, if your site engages that traffic and converts them in some way that supports your sports blogging goal.  For example if your goal is to build a community around your sports blog, then success would be measured by how many regular readers you have and how often they are commenting (interacting with your content and other readers).

The problem: many sports bloggers, especially newbies focus entirely on driving traffic and increasing page views, paying less attention to what those visitors actually do once they land on their sports blog.  Is a blog that generates 100,000 page views a month, but only has 5 subscribers and little comments, really successful?  In my opinion, no.  Traffic itself can be deceiving.  Traffic is often a product of strong marketing and networking, not necessarily strong content.

I look at traffic on its own as a measure for my marketing and networking efforts primarily.  But measure the success of my sports blog by how well received and valued my content is.  As well as how readers interact with that content.

You can’t improve what you don’t track or more likely what you pay little attention to.  Here are four concrete metrics I use to measure reader engagement and interaction, and ultimately the success of my sports blog beyond traffic.

• Conversation rate
• Bounce rate
• Average page views per visit
• Average time on site

Conversation Rate

What’s the best way to tell whether visitors are engaging with your sports blog’s content?  Comments.  The more comments you have the more people are interested in what you wrote.  And you certainly have a better chance of converting them into regular readers.

That’s where conversation rate comes in.  Simply put, it is the number of comments per post (# comments divided by # of posts).  It is a good barometer to watch over the life of your sports blogging career.  You can see trends of how certain types of posts or style of writing leads to more or less comments.  And you can keep track of how your blog is improving in terms of interaction by your readers.

For Wordpress users there is a great plugin I use that tracks your conversation rate for you called Blog Metrics, created by Joost de Valk.  It tells you the average number of comments per post (excluding your own comments) over the life of the blog and for the last 30 days.  It also tells you how many words are in each comment which gives you a good idea if people are leaving substantial comments or just fluff.  For multi-author blogs, this plugin will break out the conversation rate by author as well.

Comments play a big role in strengthening your sports blog’s social proof.  A blog with 0 comments on every or a large majority of posts feels dead, empty and frankly unpopular.  For that reason I value comments more than anything when measuring the success of my own sports blog.

If you haven’t been tracking your conversation rate, you should be.

Bounce Rate

Bounce rate is another metric used to measure visitor engagement and page effectiveness.  You will often hear this term around internet marketers (my Clark Kent job).  Bounce rate is the percentage of visitors who leave your site after landing on the entry page.  Basically, people who hit your site then “bounce” without exploring other pages on your sports blog.  As I am sure you are thinking, this is not a good thing.

Why you should care?  If your bounce rate is excessively high on average (75% or higher), it typically (not always) means your content isn’t grabbing visitors or persuading them to read more, and your page design isn’t effectively leading people towards more content on other pages.

You can easily find your sports blog’s bounce rate using Google Analytics (you should have Google Analytics by the way if you don’t already).  Here is a screen shot of the overall bounce rate of my Philly sports blog for the last month.

It is important to note that bounce rate will vary based on the source of traffic, and it should be measured against previous bounce rates, not different sources.  For example, different referring sites will have different bounce rates.  To a degree that tells you the quality of visitor each referrer is sending you.  My StumbleUpon traffic has a solid 29% bounce rate, whereas my Yardbarker traffic has a terrible 83% bounce rate.  Maybe I should try StumbleUpon ads, hmm.

There are many ways to improve your bounce rate, but that is enough information to fill many more posts.

Average Page views Per Visit

This one is well-known and monitored because it relates to CPM advertising models like the Yardbarker network.  Total number of page views divided by the total numbers of visits.

This another good indicator of how compelling your content is and how user-friendly your blog design is.  One of the most common ways to improve this number is by adding related articles to the end of posts.

Average Time on Site

This metric is self explanatory and the perfect way to see how well your content holds visitors’ attention.  Most stat packages give you this information, but if for some reason you don’t have any tracking you can check your blog using Compete’s site analytics.  Again, you should look at the average time on site from all traffic sources to evaluate your marketing efforts and referrers in relation to your sports blog’s content.

By evaluating your sports blog in these four areas you can make better decisions to improve your site.  You’ll have a better idea what content is really grabbing readers’ attention, if your blog design is working toward your ultimate goal and truly how successful your sports blog is in terms of visitor engagement.

How does your sports blog stack up in these four areas?

P.S.

The next post will be on getting more traffic and links with sports resource pages.  So make sure you subscribe to my free email updates or RSS feed so you don’t miss out.

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