This is the third and last post on the Social Power Tools To Kick It Up A Notch series. In the previous posts we reviewed ObjectiveMarketer and ClickTale and I showed you how to leverage from those tools to step up your online game. This week we’ll take a closer look at PostRank.
I’m guessing the first question to arise will be “why do I need more metrics if I’m already running Google Analytics on my blog?” and the answer is that PostRank does more than counting your pageviews. Today, you need to know how your content is performing socially, how successful are you at engaging the user, inside and outside your blog. The new media has taken the content outside to where the user hangs out, whether you’re there or not.
PostRank measures how people engages with your content and where. The whole concept behind the application is based on 2 definitions you need to learn:
Engagement Events
An event is a single activity that derives from your content. A good example of an event is a comment to your post, this takes place inside your blog. Then you have events occurring outside your blog like a tweet, a digg or a bookmark on Delicious. Engagement events are tracked wherever they happen.
Engagement Points
Points are earned based on the level of engagement, a comment on your post for example has more value than a simple click, it takes more effort by the user and it’s also far more important to you.
Then you also have Engagement Score, which is the total points accumulated by a single piece of content, in this case, a blog post. Remember that we are measuring posts, not just the big picture.
Google Analytics Integration
PostRank seamlessly integrates key traffic metrics provided by your existing Google Analytics account. This process is all done for you with a couple of clicks making it super easy. This data includes Unique Visits, Pageviews, Bounce Rate and Average Viewing Time.
A Quick Snapshot
A quick look at the overview already provides you with enough data to get a pretty good idea of what’s up just recently. What are your Pageviews and Engagement Points compared with the last 7 days and even a count of your Twitter followers (which by the way requires that you integrate your Twitter account of course).
Post Analysis
One of the things I love is the organization and simplicity when you want to analyze each piece of content in detail. The next graphic shows you how well organized each post is displayed so you can compare before you jump into a more in-depth analysis. It is a perfect example of great usability and design.
Measure Engagement On Each Piece Of Content
This is where you get all the juice, an in-depth analysis of each post, from Google key metrics to engagement events, points, averages and even how this was distributed in different social platforms. The Engagement Activity chart makes it very easy to visualize the life of each post and the conversation feed brings everything together in one place.
Engagement Trends
Engagement Trends are measured in time over the last 3 months, by region and source, displaying each social platform.
Final Thought
As I always say, tools are just tools, it’s what you do with them that’s going to make a difference. This is definitely a nice set of tools for a blogger to leverage from and it has a very affordable monthly fee of $9. Take advantage of the trial period and take it for a spin, the setup is only a few minutes and there is nothing to install on your blog.
See if you can improve how your user engages with your content.
Any thoughts?
