How Often Should Your Business Blog’s Data Be Analysed?

Take a look at a customer service strategy as an example – if you’re not analysing what your footfall or website traffic is, what your customer surveys say and what your overall feedback is telling you, how can you be certain that the level of service you’re delivering is meeting the needs of your customers?

Yet although it’s imperative any strategy’s data is analysed, it can be complicated knowing just how often the analysis needs to be carried out.

With blogging, there are various times throughout a strategy that analysis is required.  Sometimes it needs to be in-depth, other times a brief look will suffice and here we provide an insight into the times when we carry out data analysis as part of our business blogging services.

Annually / six-monthly

A business blogging strategy should run continually.  Blogging is a resource that should be invested in for the long term and considered an integral part of your organisation.  However, it’s important that a full and in-depth analysis of the strategy is carried out at least once every year, so to ensure the techniques used continue to be of the most benefit they possibly can be to both your target audience and your organisation.

In most industries, audience requirements change.  Customers start to have different needs and they look for different information from the organisations they interact with.  Therefore, what worked 12 months ago when you first kicked off your business blogging strategy may not necessarily be working today or continue to work in the future.  If the data suggests that this is the case, you need to discover (amongst other things) when the change started to happen, as you should then be able to work out which content wasn’t being as well received as it possibly could have been and how you need to develop it going forward.

Monthly

As part of our business blogging strategies, we carry out an in-depth monthly analysis of all blogging and social media activity.  Very similar to an annual / six monthly analysis, the monthly reports we produce provide an insight into how successful the strategy was throughout the previous month.

Looking at everything from unique visitor numbers on the blog posts through to interactions on Twitter, it’s vital that the strategy’s data is analysed after every month has ended.  Just as on an annual basis, customer requirements can change so quickly that you need to be confident you can respond in the quickest way possible – an annual review might highlight where you need to develop your strategy, but what if reader requirements changed only 30 days after the last annual review and you didn’t analyse your data on a monthly basis?

Weekly

A monthly review of your business blogging strategy should be considered the minimum, but a weekly analysis can be beneficial for a variety of reasons, particularly when looking to ensure your content is as user-focused as it can be.

No matter how involved you are with your target audience, you can never be certain that the messaging you’re delivering on any platform is as suited as it can be without understanding what it is they want and enjoy – and the only way to do this is to analyse the success of your previous blog posts.

When creating content for our clients’ business blogging strategies, as a general rule of thumb we keep two key points in mind – a subject that is either topical or informative (such as a news items or a ‘How To’ piece) and a focus, style or tone that has proven to be successful previously, information we gain by analysing the previous weeks’ data.

Daily

When you’re producing content for your business blog to keep your audience updated on business activities, a daily analysis of data isn’t generally required.  If you’re integrating your business blogging activities with other strategies, however, a daily analysis could prove to be extremely beneficial.

Imagine you had a landing page for one of your products or services and you were using blogging to drive traffic to it over the course of a month.  An analysis of the data on both your blog and landing page would tell you, for example, how many people clicked through to the landing page from which blog posts and how many readers followed a call to action on the landing page.  However, it would also help to highlight any problems with the page or if certain blog posts weren’t sending visitors.

By analysing data regularly, you would be able to see which blog posts were the most successful (allowing you to replicate their success moving forward) and make any necessary amendments to the landing page, so to increase the number of conversions (and ultimately sales).

All business blogging strategies need to include a period of data analysis – it’s the only way you can be certain the strategy is as successful as it can be.  With various periods of data analysis, the four here are those that we look at for our client’s strategies and which we strongly believe will allow you to see the most success when utilising our business blogging services.

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