Analyzing blog metrics always gives me a headache!

But as a blogger it’s important to know ‘Is the content you’re providing is fulfilling your readers needs?”

Metrics provide you with insights into how your readers are interacting with your content and the type of content that interests them.

Trouble is there’s numerous metrics you can use,  each provides different insight and its meaning depends on what you’re trying to achieve from your posts.

So lets start by seeing how I use one metric, reader bookmarking, to analyze post performance.

My next post will demonstrate how another metric provides different insights.

Types of Posts

As I said the meaning of a metric really depends on what you’re trying to achieve from your posts.

I think of my posts in terms of three main types:

1. Informative - ‘how to’ or information packed posts
2. Conversations – posts that focus on encouraging readers to share their thoughts in comments
3. Sharing – posts that share helpful links

All three types fulfill different readers needs and are an important part of achieving my goal of helping others using technology.

As a general rule informative posts are longer, more likely to be bookmarked and less likely to have a high comment rate.  While conversations posts are normally shorter with more comments but less likely to bookmarked.

Calculating Reader Bookmarking

Reader bookmarking shows the number of readers bookmarking your posts on social bookmarking sites such as Delicious and Diigo.  It provides an indication of how much they value it as a source of information in terms of storing it for later retrieval and sharing with others.

When using this metric I’m looking to determine:

1. What type of posts are being bookmarked?
2. Are specific topics preforming better than others?
3. Are the informative posts achieving my aim?
4. What are characteristics of posts that are highly bookmarked compared to those that are less bookmarked?

I use PostRank because it’s an easy method for determining the number of reader bookmarking per post.

Moving your mouse cursor over a PostRank score displays all their metrics associated with that post including bookmarking on Delicious and Diigo.

Check out how easy this is on The Edublogger’s PostRank page.

Read  my Latest Statistics Say My Blogs Are……? post and comments to learn more about how the PostRank score is calculated.

Top Posts Based on Bookmarking

So here’s the top 20 Edublogger posts based on Delicious bookmarking — the numbers after each post is how many times the post has been bookmarked.

1. 50+ Ways To Create Digital Stories With Students — 117
2. How I Use RSS To Make My Life Easier — 79
3. What Everybody Ought To Know About Podcasting: Part I –77
4. Creating Student Accounts Using One Gmail Account — 73
5. Here’s My First Five Tips For Writing Better Blog Posts — What Are Yours? –73
6. Are You Twittering? Here’s How I Use Twitter — 72
7. Embedding Jing Screencasts Into Blog Posts –71
8. Quick Start Tips For Student Blogging Part I: Setting Up Your Class Blog –59
9. Quick Start Tips For New Skype Users — 59
10. Copyright and Using Images in Blog Posts — 56
11. What Everybody Ought To Know About Podcasting: Part II — 48
12. Here’s My Top Five Mistakes Made By New Bloggers — What Are Yours? — 39
13. Finding and Adding Creative Commons Images To Your Blog Posts — 38
14. Setting Up iGoogle For Your Personal Learning — 37
15. Quick Start Tips For New Flickr Users: Part I — 31
16. Ideas For Student Bloggings From….How Do You Do What You Do! — 29
17. Adding A Voki Speaking Avatar To A Post or Page of Your Blog — 29
18. Managing Comments and Posts On Student Blogs Using Google Reader — 28
19. What Are The Different Roles Of Users? — 27
20. What’s The Difference Between Tags and Categories, You Ask? — 27

Definitely there are posts in the  list that have ranked considerably higher than I’d expect and others that haven’t done as anticipated.

What does it mean?

Not sure but I know my headache is getting worse

So I would love to hear your thoughts on:

1. What topics are readers finding more valuable in terms of bookmarking?
2. What are characteristics of posts that are highly bookmarked compared to those that are less bookmarked?

Meanwhile I feel the headache may continue as I ponder which metric we should look at next?

What is your thoughts?  Page views?  Linking? Comments rate?  And what tool(s) should I use to obtain the metrics?

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