We’ve championed the use of blogs for marketing for a long time. Now we need to look at whether blogs are actually working. As with all marketing tools, you must measure their effectiveness, adjust and re-measure as you go along. You need to make sure that you blogs are reaching the right audiences.

It?s relatively simple to analyse your business blog metrics, via your website traffic – Google Analytics provides this info. Dig deeper into this information to find out if the visitors to your site are people who are genuine customer prospects. Here?s a few ways you can assess this.

Traffic sources – analyse and identify them

The majority of B2B companies will see their website traffic coming from the same sources ? usually referring sites and social media. Consider the common audience demographics of your referral traffic sources. If you run a business-to-business site, do individual-focused sites like StumbleUpon and Digg bring you the right traffic, or should you focus your promotional efforts on business networking sites like LinkedIn? While exposure to a large audience can often boost your site’s SEO rankings, relying on such sites for traffic isn’t an effective long-term strategy when you’re searching for qualified leads.

Focus instead on promoting your content to related industry blogs and through your company’s existing social media channels. Though traffic rates may not always be as impressive, visitors from these types of referral sources are more likely to engage with your content and achieve the conversions you’re looking for.

Look at your keyword search results

Whilst looking at your site analytics, have a look at the search terms that are driving traffic to your site.

If many of your most popular website search terms are for terms that are tenuously related to your core business, it’s time to start thinking more strategically about creating content that relates to your business goals. We recently did this for a client, when we realized that visitors where finding her site for phrases that weren’t on the site. Since we’ve written a number of blogs about these topics for her site, the traffic coming through though topics has increased dramatically.

Pay attention to user engagement measures

Are visitors bouncing away from your site within a few seconds, or do they stay for a while, browse through your archives and even sign up for your newsletter? If your website visitors rarely view more than one page at a time, this is a sign that they’re either not your target audience, or that the content you’re producing isn’t compelling enough to entice them to stay. You can use tools such as www.MarketingGrader.com to see how people are engaging with your site and how you can use your blog to increase your score. Last week, our website scored 78%, which we were really pleased with. This week it went up to over 80% purely because we’d added more blogs to our site.

Are your blogs effective? What can you do to help them grow your business?