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.
{ 9 comments… read them below or add one }
Nice post, Dannie, there’s a lot of good information here. I will definitely be trying to implement this into my blog.
Thanks Neil. I am going to trying and pump out more of the same and keep the fluff to a minimum. And actually make this blog about improving sports sports blog. If you have suggestions for content let me know.
Good post. It also depends on what kind of visitors you get. Right now, I’m getting a ton of search engine visitors. They typically spend a lot of time on each post because they are interested in the information, but it is harder to turn them into return visitors.
Mitch, exactly. That is why I said…
Not all traffic is created equal.
very nice post. I recently noticed my overall site bounce rate has dropped 14% over the past week and a half. And looking over the data it was no surprise that this was the same period that stumbleupon became a major driving force in my traffic. When it was majority ballhype and yardbarker the bounce rate was close to 90% i’m now down to 76% and still trending lower.
Comments pretty much are the end all be all of what we do. The thing is though, multiple studies have shown that on a productive site, 2% of the member of your community provide 98% of the user generated content. Think about that… That’s not always going to be true, but the figure is rarely higher than 5. You got your sites like deadspin, where you’ll look at it and be like no way, but those 100’s of comments they get on every post are always from the same crowd, and they get millions of hits monthly, so it figures out.
Oh, BTW, I’ve seen this theme somewhere before…. Looks good on you, though. Best theme I’ve ever used….
Also, adding into what I’ve added. I’ve been lurking in the shadows of this site for a long time, I’ve posted only one comment before. I don’t know why it’s like that, but that’s how we work.
As much as many of us hate to admit it, most of our readers are bloggers, and for whatever reason, we don’t necessarily get involved the discussions all the time.
And, as Michael said, he gets a lot of SE traffic, as I’m sure you do as well. The three of us, I’ve noticed, bounce back and forth between the first three pages of Google for a few competitive terms (with Mike deadlocked on that front page), and this traffic doesn’t convert into comments most of the time. They get what they want and bounce out.
Nick, I agree and disagree (only a little).
I agree 100% about your stat regarding a small percentage of readers provide the larger majority of comments. It’s the common 80/20 phenomenon with a larger disparity. I experience it full force on my actual sports blog.
On the other hand, I don’t think on my Philly sports blog that most of our readers are bloggers. Partly because you are right about bloggers comprise many sports blogs audience. We work very hard to find non-blogging readers looking for a home to talk sports. I think that hard work has paid off in the number of comments we receive per post.
Bloggers already have a natural home (their own blog) to express their opinions on sports. This is a topic I will be writing about a lot on this blog, because I think it is the key to sports blogging success. Building a community around your blog, not just driving traffic.
Oh yeah, this theme rocks. I am waiting for them to release a 3-column theme like the one on my sports blog so I can easily make the switch while keeping the general design the same.
Appreciate the comments.
They got a new release out where you can customize the size of the columns, the font, etc. Maybe you should check it out. It’s pretty amazing…
I also work VERY hard to find non-bloggers, and most of those active on my site actually don’t have websites, which I pride myself on. I don’t write for the blogging audience, I tend to go towards more feature-type pieces that attract a different audience than say, the Big Lead would. Not that there is anything wrong with that audience or how they write, it just isn’t my style.