"How to measure the success of a blog"

I read Tomasz Tunguz's blog on LinkedIn about blog reach over the weekend. In his post, he discusses some shortcomings of blog analytics. in his post, he laments the unavailability of analytics tools that can segment readers into categories (such as entrepreneur or sales person, for example) and the content they viewed and whether it resonated or not. He goes on to point out that LinkedIn is best suited for such analytics as it manages personal information for all of its members and hosts the blogs themselves.

Of course I run analytics on this blog, but it doesn't really give me the depth of information Tunguz is talking about. Sure, I can see where readers came from, what they read, how long it took them to read it (or not), and whether they visited any other pages during their browse through my blog. To be able to get deeper information would mean to leverage information in provenance from various databases (variety), to analyse a potentially large volume of information (volume), and all being created and analyzed in near real time (velocity). Sounds a lot like big data, huh? Maybe for sites with a wider audience like on LinkedIn, GigaOm, or The Huffington Post.

As Tunguz says, such a tool for regular bloggers does not (yet?) exist. There would be a requirement for users to identify themselves--raising the potential for privacy concerns-- and the challenge of obtaining relevant information about their background to segment them though there are several social media tools that offer APIs that can help in that respect. We could also infer engagement by the amount of time the reader spends reading a blog and, at least for first time visitors, how many additional blog posts they read.

Interesting as it is, this level of analytics is not available to bloggers such as myself. If anyone is developing such a tool, sign me up for the alpha and beta tests. If one already exists, then this post is a moot point and please let me know the name of the tool.