Is your business blog getting the results you want? What metrics can you use to find out what’s working and where you can improve?

Blogger Avinash Kaushik, author of Web Analytics 2.0 offers six key factors you can measure to determine the success of your blogging efforts:

1. Author Contribution-How much and how often do you add to your blog? If you use WordPress, you can find this data by using the General Stats plugin. You can use these figures to find the average amount of times you post per month and the average word count per post. Whether you post once a week or every day, the important thing here is to maintain consistency and regularly contribute to your blog.
2. Audience Growth-You can use web analytics tools such as Google Analytics and WebTrends, which will tell you how many visits and unique visitors you are receiving each month. You will also want to check Feedburner to get a picture of your offsite audience growth via RSS feed subscribers. Regarding such subscribers, Kaushik comments, “It is very hard to convert a Visitor into a Subscriber, someone who has now given you permission to push content to them. That extra commitment is worth a lot to me. I would take ten extra feed subscribers over a hundred visitors.”
3. Conversation Rate-Your conversion rate is the number of visitor comments divided by the number of posts. Social media is about engaging and creating a relationship with your audience, and blogging is no exception.
4. Citations-Technorati measures and ranks the importance of a blog according to how many times it is mentioned or cited or linked to across the web. Google will also tell you how many other sites or blogs have linked to your blog.
5. Cost-Businesses especially should measure how much it costs to produce a blog in terms of labor hours and technology expenses such as hosting.
6. ROI-The value of your business blog can be measured in strictly monetary terms, but that won’t give you the complete picture of its true worth. As Kaushik aptly puts it, “It is about the Customer. It is about the Conversation. It is about creating Customer Evangelists. It is about Social Objects. Your blog facilitates this more than anything else you could do. Any business, big or small, that is not leveraging this medium in a honest attempt to have a new kind of conversation is committing a massive crime.”

B2B marketers, when developing a marketing plan and corresponding marketing budget, will find an effective model to follow in the successful B2B organizations who participated in a recent study by Lenskold Group. The B2B companies in the survey who rated their marketing efforts as highly effective and efficient differed from other B2B marketing organizations in four key ways:

1. Of the marketers who categorized themselves as highly effective and efficient, only 10 percent responded “don’t know” when asked how much profit increase they could generate with a 10 percent increase in their lead generation budget, whereas 48 percent of other marketers did not know how much profit could be generated with such an increase. In fact, 65 percent of highly effective marketers said they could utilize a 10 percent increase in their lead generation budget to create more than a 10 percent improvement in profits, while only 35 percent of other marketers indicated such ability.
2. A much higher percentage (70 percent vs. 35 percent) of these highly effectiveB2B marketers indicated that they currently track and measure lead quality based on revenue from the initial sale as well as total customer revenue over time.
3. Most (60 percent) use ROI metrics to assess the efficacy of their marketing campaigns. The ROI users were also more likely—at 68 percent—to be outgrowing their competition, compared with only 48 percent of marketers who use traditional methods to evaluate marketing effectiveness.
4. The most effective marketers are more likely to engage and educate customers through product trials; 82 percent rated this method highest on the list of effective means of generating high value leads that are likely to convert to sales.

The study also reported that 51 percent of B2B marketers who use marketing ROI metrics consider customer revenue generated from the initial sale as an indicator of lead quality. And 63 percent of marketers who use financial metrics rather than traditional ones indicated that they measure lead quality based on sales conversion rates.

Interestingly, 31 percent of small businesses reported a need to improve their basic capability to identify their most effective lead acquisition strategies. As the results of this study clearly show, tracking lead quality with detailed financial metrics should be a top priority for B2B companies.