Week 14 Part A: What we Learn from Google Analytics

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 Google Analytics
Google Analytics is one of the more than 270 tools in Google's arsenal. Google Analytics is an easy (mostly) and free reporting service offered by Google to track website traffic. The data supplied from Google Analytics can help you to learn what is working and what is not thus it helps you make better decisions about your online presence.
 
What exactly does Analytics do? In short, it collects data, processes and analyzes the data, and generates reports from the data. Google Analytics records the activity of your user from the moment he arrives until he leaves your website by using a combination of cookies and JavaScript. 
 
Out of all the data and reports generated by Google Analytics, the following are what I feel are most important to Trident Pacific Consulting. I can't figure out how to install it on his Word Press site yet, so the screen captures I included are from my class Blogger site.
 

Acquisition  

The Acquisition section tells you where your visitors originated from, their behavior on your site and their conversion patterns. This is a key section when determining which online marketing tactics are bringing the most visitors to your website. Some of the ways someone gets to your website include: 
  1. Direct: Your customer typed in your URL or clicked on a bookmark.
  2. Organic search: This is a result from a search engine. 
  3. Paid search: Like above but you paid a search engine to drive the results. 
  4. Social networks: Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, etc
  5. Email campaigns
  6. Referral: Any websites that link to yours.
  7. Other advertising

    Screen capture of acquisition stats from my Blogger site.

    		   

Engagement

Engagement measures any user interaction with your site or app such as scrolling, filling out a form or buying a product. In order to achieve their purpose websites need to be engaging. The purpose of a website varies. It may be selling a product or service, providing help or information, or providing customer support.  Ideally, you want to have a stable and growing audience of engaged visitors. Google Analytics can help determine how engaged your audience is. 

Screen capture of engagement from my Blogger site

 

Demographics

The demographics category includes four dimensions, all which Google aligns with the ones they use in Google Adwords. Having the statistics of your visitors gives you gives you key information about your target market. You can then use that information to run a Google Adwords campaign targeting the same audience

  • Age Group: the user will be assigned to one of six age groups (18–24, 25–34, 35–44, 45–54, 55–64, 65+) based on their browsing behavior
  • Gender: male or female
  • Affinity Categories: predicted interests of the user based on their online behavior and purchases.
  • In-Market Segments: predicted industry segment of the user (e.g. travel, education/post-secondary, etc.) 
Screen Capture of demographics from my Blogger site


Why I feel these metrics are the most important.

Aid in SEO:  The statistics supplied by Google Analytics can be useful for informing our SEO. The platform helps to answer  questions about how users find us and interact with our site. It will tell us how much traffic our sit is getting, which pages perform the best, which search queries visitor use to find us, and what is the bounce rate.

Improve site performance: Currently Trident Pacific Consulting gets very little web traffic. Learning what engages the viewer will help to guide future revisions of the website. It can help us determine which pages get the most traffic, how long the visitors spend on each page, and at what stage a visitor leaves the site. Revisions can be made to get more conversions.

Improve marketing campaigns: Gathering a broad range of data about current visitors will help target future viewers. Most importantly the data can aid us to focus our efforts on the channels that bring the most visitors, especially the ones that are legitimately looking for services in our niche and convert to real paying clients.

 

Project Activity: I liked and commented on all of my classmates Business Facebook pages when we were asked to do so early in the semester.


 

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