Advanced Blogging Metrics: Measure Your Hotel’s ROI

As part of my quest to make social media marketing more measurable, I’d like to share some ways you can gauge the success of a blog.  If you’re thinking about starting one, hopefully this will demonstrate that the format can be tested for return on investment.  If you already have a blog, then these measures should help you measure progress:

Post Frequency: number of posts / number of months. Blogs exist for frequent communication with their readers.  Make sure your blog isn’t just a website with the word “Blog” in the title.

Unique Blog Readership: unique blog visitors + average daily feed subscribers.  Since many people receive updates through RSS newsfeeds (half of this blog’s readers do), you need to take these people into account as well.

Conversation Rate: number of conversations & trackbacks / number of posts (during time period). Engaging your readers is a core purpose of blogging.  How many of your readers interact with your hotel blog?

External Benchmarking: Technorati Rank.  With so many voices in the blogosphere, it’s important to make sure you’re relevant.  Technorati rank is based on the resources you contribute – and other people link to.  You can’t be a one-hit wonder, building your ranking takes time.

Cost of Blog Ownership: setup & hosting + time invested / time period (eg, 15 hours/week @ $75/hour).  Since time is a big factor in blogging, also consider the opportunity cost of your blog.

Return on Investment: Calculating blog ROI is a little more difficult, but consider these factors:

• Conversion rates from traffic from your blog to your hotel website
• Improvement in guest satisfaction
• Lowered cost of PR (press releases, media coverage, etc)

(Credit: Avinash Kaushik and his excellent book, Web Analytics: An Hour a Day)