A big part of a business’s content marketing efforts should include blogs. Your blog has the potential to inform and engage your audience, setting you up as an authority in your field. After taking the time to write a well-researched, informative post, don’t stop there: look for images, embed relevant links, and make you have an enticing call-to-action (CTA). But how do you ensure that all your strategic marketing efforts are actually delivering results?

Content marketing agencies do this by tracking metrics like blog post engagement. Creating effective content is hard enough as it is. You need to know what’s working so you can amplify those efforts. Here’s how agencies track blog post engagement:

1. Total Number of Comments

The total number of comments a blog post gets is a great indicator of whether a post was effectively able to engage your readers or not. If a post was able to prompt conversations from your readers, you know they are paying attention and have gotten value from it.

It also helps if you spur the conversation. This can be something as simple as asking a question that encourages your readers to answer in the comment section below or asking them to share their own experiences.

2. Number of Social Media Shares

According to Neil Patel, people share content on their personal social media platforms only if they connect emotionally to it. If you consistently see your content being shared on social media, it’s a great sign that you’re creating material that your audience considers valuable and relevant.

My experience is that social media shares alone aren’t purely indicative of an effective blog, however. At the end of the day, it has to tie back to your bottom line. So, be sure to check your social media shares against other metrics such as how many leads you generate from it.

3. Number of Sites That Link Back to Yours

There are a lot of websites out there that fill their pages with low-quality content that does little more than take up space. If you focus on creating high-value content, however, you’re essentially rising above the clutter and noise of the Internet and establishing yourself as an authority in your niche. Once you do, you’ll notice that more websites will link back to your content. The number of sites that do so can indicate how engaging a post is.

4. Time Spent on Site

If your readers like the content you’re producing, you can expect them to stick around and explore your website. This is easily trackable via Google Analytics—specifically the bounce rate and average session duration.

These two metrics basically tell you how long people are staying on your website. The longer a reader stays on your site, the more engaged they are with your post. On the other hand, if a reader immediately clicks on the back button after landing on your post, it’s a sign that your blog failed to capture their attention and this resulted in them bouncing off.

Hope my answer helps! If you have any questions, I encourage you to check out our Twitter or LinkedIn and join the conversation. You can also leave a comment below and I’ll get back to you as soon as I can.