Blogging needs to be an absolutely essential part of your marketing plan. In fact, your blog is at the center of all of your content marketing efforts. Without understanding the ways to track and ensure blogging success, you’re just shooting in the dark hoping for a miracle. Miracles do happen online, but it’s more likely to have success that is planned.

Track the right information about your blog and website provides many numbers that you can view and study. Viewing the right stats may help you do more of what is working, and less of what is not working.

With the right numbers you can tell how many people are visiting your blog, what they’re reading, where they came from and more. You can determine through statistics how many people come to your site and “bounce” off, and how many stick around to read more. Plus, if you have your analytics set up right, you can figure out how many you’re converting to subscribers and how many of those because customers.

Here are the top MUST TRACK marketing stats you’ll want to look at:

• How Many Visitors – This is pretty self-explanatory, but it’s a good indicator if your content marketing is working or not. If your number of visitors is steadily moving upwards then your content is doing its job.
• How Many New Visitors – Knowing how many visitors are new is also an important number to notice. This helps you know if you’re getting a rise in notice and a wider audience.
• Where the Visitors Came From – This is an important metric, because if you have more visitors from one place over another you can then put more effort in the place that is converting.
• How Many Repeat Visitors – Having repeat visitors can be a good indication of having content that readers want to consume. If you have low repeat visitors, you may not be converting well or retargeting visitors well.
• How Many Visitors Bounce Off – Most blogs have some bounces but if you have a super-high bounce rate, it can be a sign of poor targeting.
• How Many Visitors Stay to Read – Look at how many people read your blog posts, and what they’re reading. Create more content that they like to read.
• How Many Visitors Comment – Engagement is a great sign of good social media marketing and if you don’t have enough, do what you can to get more.

And the two most important numbers of all:

• How Many Visitors Sign Up for Email Lists – One of the points of driving traffic to your website or blog is to get email subscribers. You should do what needs to be done to collect as many targeted subscribers as possible, because email is where you’ll earn repeat website and blog readers and where you’ll get customers.
• How Many Subscribers Convert to Customers – The other number that is essential to know is how many subscribers convert to customers. This will help you know if what you’re doing is working in the way you hope.

If you don’t know this information, it’s hard to know if what you’re doing is working. If you really want to make your business exceed expectations and run a successful online marketing campaign, then knowing these numbers and responding with appropriate actions will make all the difference.