Measurement matters. Recently at the Knoxville Chamber Bright Ideas seminar on blogging my friend and real estate agent Suzy Trotta was sharing about her Knoxville real estate blog AllAroundKTown (an incredible resource). Suzy shared an important take-away, how she measures the success of her blog. Many bloggers will watch the number of page views or how many unique visitors they have — she measures it in closings. Yes, how many closings come from her blog. Let’s talk about three ways to find your golden metric.

Pick a Key Business Metric

I’d suggest using a key business metric like Suzy is - closings. Ask yourself, “What is the ‘close’ for my business?” Another way to this is to ask, “What is the goal of my marketing?” It could be a sale, a lead, or a donation; it could also be positive mentions or referrals. Start with the important metric you are already measuring and continue to monitor it closely, but watch where the correlation happens. I know you are thinking, “Suzy has it easy, she spends hours with each client and can easily find out how many have found her via AllAroundKTown.” To that I say, touché. While in your business it might be more difficult than Suzy’s to track it directly, I’m positive that with some work we can establish correlation to your metrics.

Establishing correlation can start as simple as charting your daily sales and your daily blog traffic and looking for trends between the two numbers.

Relevant Numbers

Pick a competitor or two in your industry and benchmark against them, use Compete.com or Quantcast.com to compare your website page views and unique visitors. On the social media side of things, looking at Facebook or Twitter you can chart your followers and fans using Social Media Monitor from Wildfire against your benchmark organizations and see how you’ve grown over time.

Don’t Chase

Stay away from vanity metrics, those that have little effect on your business but are fun to keep track of. Too often they will lead you down a path that isn’t tied to your ultimate goal and will leave you measuring metrics that are not important. To go back to Suzy, say hypothetically she really loves comments and so her goal is to increase comments on the blog by 10% month-over-month. Honestly it’s not a bad goal by itself, except that Suzy blogs because she wants to sell more houses, not because she wants to be the spot for the conversation about the real estate to happen online. Her key metric is closings, not comments, and without that goal in mind, she could chase comments, ultimately to the detriment of her real estate business.

In the end, measuring the right metrics will allow you to evaluate how effective your online marketing efforts are compared to the goals you’ve set out to accomplish.