How You Measure Blog ROI?

Is it possible to measure your blog’s ROI? Can you tell with specificity just how much money your blog is making you? Let’s examine.

If you include tracking codes in every link on your blog and you can track the movement of everyone who visits your website from your blog – where they go, which links they click, what images and graphics they view, which calls to action they respond to – then you might be able to accurately measure the ROI of your company blog. But a lot of that isn’t possible, is it?

I know of no analytics package that can track a single visitor from your blog to your website and every move that he or she makes all the way down to the sale. That would be the perfect way to measure ROI, wouldn’t it?

But since we can’t do that, can we get a realistic picture of the ROI of your blog marketing efforts? I think we can ballpark it, but it requires a little mental gymnastics.

First, you have to see how much traffic your blog is actually getting. That’s easy. Any analytics tool will tell you that. But the sources of your traffic is just as important. Are you getting visitors from PPC ads, search engines, social media sources, etc.? All of that matters.

Next, how many conversions does your blog actually have? If your blog isn’t set up for conversions, that’s OK. Not all blogs are set up to convert. Many blogs are lead generators and are meant to drive traffic to other landing pages. That’s OK. But if that is the case then you need to measure how much of your traffic from the blog is being sent to those landing pages. If you are driving traffic to several landing pages then you should segment your traffic analytics so that you know how much traffic is going to each landing page.

From there, you can measure how many conversions each landing page is getting. But you also need to factor in traffic from other sources. If the blog is the only driver of traffic to your landing pages then it’s easy. But if you have traffic coming from other sources then you need to know how much. Look at your conversion numbers and break them down into a percentage of your traffic stats by source. Example:

Landing Page A
       SE1        SE2       Social Media Site       Blog
       1,000     1,000         1,000               1,000

If these represent one month’s worth of traffic numbers from each source and you’ve seen 400 conversions for that month it equates to 10% traffic to conversion ratio. Divide this by the number of sources (4) and you’ve got 100 conversions per source, or 10%. But what if the numbers are uneven, like this:

Landing Page A
       SE1       SE2     Social Media Site         Blog
       1,500     500           750                 1,250

There are still 4,000 visitors to your landing page, but it’s not an even breakdown of 25% per traffic source. You need to figure the percentage of each conversion source. SE1 = 37.5%, SE2 = 12.5%, SMS = 6.25%, and blog = 31.25%. So you just figure out what your conversions are and plug in the percentage of your traffic figures to get the corresponding percentage of conversions.

There are problems with this approach, however. It doesn’t take into consideration the number of people who read your blog, go away and come back a month later, read it again then visit your website, go away, revisit the website and convert after that. In other words, there is no perfect way to track the user behavior of every visitor. And realistically, very few of your conversions will be from visitors on their first visit to your website or blog. In fact, most of your conversions will be on subsequent visits to either your website or blog or both. That makes the challenge of measuring ROI a whole lot more complicated.

In short, there’s no perfect way to measure the ROI of your blog. The benefits are more intangible than tangible. If a blog increasing your presence within your niche, both search engine presence and social proof, then it is doing what it is supposed to be doing. Would you rather have a visitor to your website who made a purchase based on top-of-mind awareness a year after discovering your blog or would you rather have a first-time visitor who makes an impulsive decision to buy then never returns? If you answered the former then that would be a wise choice since that visitor is likely to return and buy something else if satisfied.

So, to answer the question, you can measure the ROI of your blog but you can’t measure it perfectly. It is best to realize the intangible benefits and play them for all they are worth.