How To Measure The Success Of Your Guest Post

Guest posting has numerous benefits, from authority building to actual lead generation. Going after one (more tangible) of the goals diminishes the value of guest blogging: You just cannot underestimate the power of a well-established brand!

But how do you measure the success of each individual guest post as well as guest posting campaign as a whole? How do you define and measure things like authority and brand building? How do you estimate whether your guest post actually went well to learn from the experience moving forward?

There's no way you can measure success of a guest post based on one isolated metric. It all comes down to the combination of metrics and tools:

On- and Off-Page Engagement

Engagement is the fastest and easiest way to get an idea of how well your article was received. By engagement, I mean both:

• Meaningful blog comments (Real discussions with questions and well-grounded arguments that contribute to the quality of the article)
• Social media shares.

With guest posting, you may want to compare your article engagement numbers with other articles on the blog. For that, try using this free Google Chrome extension that shows social media numbers for any URLs you are visiting:

Brand Mentions

The most powerful benefit of guest blogging is its ability to build your authority within a niche. Previously, I already listed some examples of how even huge businesses are using guest blogging for brand building.

For smaller brands with lower digital marketing budgets guest blogging as means to get their names out there makes even more sense. And if you are looking to build your personal brand, guest blogging is surely the way to go.

Hence monitoring your brand mentions when engaged in a solid guest posting campaign is a must. I use the combination of two tools to track mentions in both social media and digital media outlets (blogs and magazines):

• BrandMentions.com is a great way to monitor your brand mentions in web publications. It sends email alerts whenever your name is mentioned by a blog and it has an amazingly huge and fast database. It's much faster than Google alerts too.
• While BrandMentions.com is great for spotting when your name is mentioned by bloggers and writers, Mention is great for monitoring social media mentions (especially Twitter and Facebook). They will also send email digests of your daily results for you to easily scroll through and timely notice any spikes in mentions or important discussion to participate in.

Traffic and Leads

Getting relevant traffic is often #1 objective behind guest blogging campaign, especially for newly-launched sites. I usually advise against starting guest posting for the sake of building traffic because you may be quickly disappointed.

The fact is, articles even on highest profile blogs won't bring an overwhelming amount of traffic. People just don't click links that much. On the bright side, referral guest blogging traffic is the best for conversions because people coming from your guest post already know you and trust your expertise.

That being said, don't look at traffic numbers as an isolated metric: Keep an eye on conversions. So the first step would be setting up your goals accordingly. Here's a good guide for you to do that. You can also use custom reporting to track URLs you were referencing in your guest articles.

You can easily see your most effective referrals in Google Analytics Acquisition -> Referrals section:

And how are you measuring the success of your guest posting campaigns? Please share your ideas in the comments!