Blogs are incredibly useful for sharing updates and announcements, highlighting to best practices, and gathering attention and information from people in your digital workplace. While wikis are great for capturing and storing information, blog articles let your members contribute their thoughts and ideas, and include a bit of personality.  

Whether using them for announcements or thought leadership, there are a lot of opportunities to monitor the kind of traction blogs have in your digital workplace. Compare them with other blog posts in your Igloo, examine what their traffic sources are and how that fits with your content and notification strategy, and gain insight into the specifics of your members to understand who reads them and why, and have a better understanding of whether they're reaching your target audience. Today we'll look at ways to leverage the analytics tools built into Igloo to answer all of those questions. 

Traffic

The Google Analytics integration makes it easy to find out where views are coming from. Use the Navigation Summary in the Site Content area to find out whether members are coming from your front page, from their team Spaces, or navigating in from outside your Igloo. In addition, articles now track email previews, letting you view people who read it directly from their instant subscriptions. Use these tools to learn about the ways your members move through your digital workplace, in order to better deliver content to them. 

Comparisons

Use the Top Content view in your Igloo's Workplace Analytics to compare the performance of your articles with other items in the past four weeks. Are they climbing in that list, or are there other resources so consistently consulted that they hold steady? The Google Analytics integration also offers an easy way of comparing views on items, letting you see which posts or post times gain traction, and compare views hour by hour to see how members engage. 

Member Interaction

For a more granular look at how people interact with your posts, you can turn to your digital workplace's data feeds. The fContentBlog table logs every single event that happens on blog posts in your Igloo. Limiting that by the blog_key will let you aggregate views, comments, likes, edits and more, cataloging all of the interactions on a post. You can use this to gather a snapshot of how your article performs a few hours after posting, and check in on it again in a few days. Is there a pattern to the views? Did it move off your homepage in the meantime? Are your thought leaders engaging with members in the comments? The answers to all of these questions lie in your data feeds. 

Your digital workplace offers an array of tools to answer key questions about your blog articles. Identifying patterns can help you find the best times to post, and how to build your Pages to reach everyone you need. 

If you have other questions about analytics, data feeds, workflows, or best practices, you can leave a comment here, or ask a question in the Community area.