You can measure just about everything about a blog: unique visitors, length of visit, incoming links, page views and on and on.  But what f you need to measure influence? How do you do that?  I’m trying with a little formula I made up.

Average Daily Page Views divided by Technorati Authority gives us a number that, when compared to the same formulation from other blogs, might tell us something about a blog’s influence.

This new metric needs a name and being the vain inventor that I am I suggest we call this the Groves.  As in “What’s your Groves at right now?” “Around 4 as of this morning,” you’d answer.  “Pretty good Groves,” they’d reply.  See how that works?  OK, I agree, we need a better name but I’ll rely on you comenters for that.  But for the rest of our little discussion I’ll have to call it something so Groves it is.

How is this new metric useful?  What’s it actually tell us?

A case study: Blog A has a Technorati Authority of 1,000 and page views of 1,000 daily. Blog B has an authority of 300 and page views of 600 daily.

At first glance it looks like the most influential or compelling blog is Blog A because it gets the most views and the most links.  But Blog A has a Groves of 1 and Blog B has a Groves of 2.  That means every unique link to Blog A in the last six months (it’s Authority, if you work at keeping it updated) has generated only 1 page view today.  A million people may have clicked those links, stopped by Blog A for less than fifteen seconds, but the font or color scheme or writing or viewpoint of the blog wasn’t compelling enough to make them come back.

Blog B, on the other hand, turned the average link in the last six months into 2 page views today.  Folks who came to Blog B saw through a link experienced something they liked enough to dig deeper twice as often as those visiting Blog A.

I’ve tested this metric recently.  You may recall that Compassion International took a bunch of bloggers to Uganda to blog about their ministry to the poorest of the poor.  The bloggers posted about what they experienced, linked to Compassion’s site and asked their readers to sponsor children there. When the trip was over the sponsorships generated from the trip were tallied and then analyzed.  While every blogger did a great job communicating on Compassion’s behalf, some blogs generated more visits to Compassion’s site and more sponsorships.  I assumed that in general in the blogs responsible for the most children being sponsored were also the blogs with the most readers.

Wrong.

The blog with the most traffic did not generate the most sponsorships.  Nor did the blog with the greatest authority.

I ranked the blogs three ways using statistics from before the trip began (everyone’s authority, views and visitors jumped during the trip): one list sorted by authority, one by traffic, and one by sponsorships generated.  None of the lists matched up. In other words, the blogs were in a different order on all three lists.  Page views didn’t seem to determine response by readers, nor did authority. Then I ranked the blogs by their Groves and that list almost exactly matched the list of blogs ordered by number of sponsorships generated.  [There was one exception: my blog.  I ranked higher for sponsorships than my, ahem, Groves, indicated I should have but that makes sense since my readers have heard about Compassion’s ministry for years – you guys were warmer to the idea than maybe readers of other blogs hearing about poverty and Compassion for the first time.]

This new metric seems to be measuring something potentially useful then.  It measures present influence, perhaps, taking into account not only the quantity of links and readers but also the like-ability of a blog’s content and it’s apparent connection with readers.  But, like so many metrics, a blog’s Groves is most useful relative to the same measurement from another source: relative to another blog’s Groves or your blog’s past Groves history. So what’s your Groves?  And, please, come up with a better name for this thing.