What are realistic goals for a law blog’s web stats?

That question was raised on a law marketing listserve this morning.

The questioning lawyer wanted to know how his pages per visit, bounce rate, average time on site and percentage of new visitors to total visitors compared with other law blogs. Was he successful?

I responded that the hard, meaningful info is the most telling of success.

• Are you getting more calls about doing the work you want for the people you want to do it for?
• Is the media contacting you more often?
• Are you getting more speaking engagements in front of your target audience?
• Is your network of professional colleagues and referral sources increasing?

If you are going to look at stats – hey, we all do, we’re human – focus on these items for a blog.

• Unique visitors. Are they trending up?
• Referrals. Where are you being cited as an authority in your niche that is in turn driving traffic? Is the number of places referring traffic increasing?
• RSS subscribers. Is the number of RSS subscribers trending up?
• Keywords and key phrase searches. Are the terms being searched on in search engines resulting in click throughs to your blog the terms you expect people to search and find you?
• Referrals and Directs as a percentage of total traffic. If you can get referrals and directs to 50 to 60% of the total visitors coming to your blog, you’re doing great as that tells you people are looking for you and your stuff, as opposed to arriving at your blog via random searches. Many of those random searches and resulting clicks to your blog have nothing to do with what you do or publish on.

At the end of the day you’ll know if your blog is successful by the work you’re getting, the fun you’re having, and the positive feedback you’re getting. There’s nothing like the feeling you get publishing a meaningful and successful blog. Have faith, you’ll know when when you get there.

But like I said we’re all human. We’re going to take a peek at our web stats. I just did before I published this post.

These are the webstats I tend to look at for my blog. I’d be interested in hearing what you other guys look at when you check your webstats.