As blogging and social media begin to enter into the business and marketing mainstream, we inevitably seek ways to measure their performance.

When a company launches a blog, it wants to know all it can about the traffic coming to the site, particularly the amount of traffic.

But is traffic volume in and of itself the best way to measure the performance of your blog? Here are areas of your blog's traffic that might be more important.

1. Where Is Your Traffic Coming from?

Web site traffic sources are also known as referral sources. If I could study only one area of my blog's traffic, I would choose to study referrals. Why does referral traffic carry so much weight? Because it tells me which sites are sending traffic to my blog.

Let's say you daily check your blog's traffic and know that you usually get 50 visitors on an average Tuesday. But this Tuesday you got 256. Why? Obviously, you had a traffic spurt that came from somewhere... but what caused it? Was it one blog link? Or did one blog link to your blog, then three other blogs saw the first link and added a link on their sites? Or did a prominent Twitter user send a link to followers on Twitter? Without monitoring your referral traffic, you really have no idea what happened.

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