Using analytical data to learn more about your consumers

Our blogs for class are fairly straightforward. There aren’t many bells and whistles on the blogs, so our Google Analytics reports will be fairly simple. We can get information on how many people visited our site, how long they stayed, and even from where they viewed the page(s).

Although I’m not sure the funnel would have much function on my site, I guess directing visitors to another site or perhaps a particular Web site, Twitter or Facebook page could be mapped out through a funnel. For example, if I am writing on particular topic, let’s say the latest shoes for spring in this case, and I want to get people to visit my latest line of spring footwear on my Web site or Facebook page, then I might want to have a funnel in place to get people to those sites via my blog or vice versa. And, I want the path clearly defined so that people do indeed get directed to that information and actually go there.

Goals in the analytical tool appeared to be more complicated to me. I understand the point of it, but how to set those goals up were unclear to me. I think on the blog it would be nice to add a thank you feature when someone comments on your blog. This could be done by establishing a new goal, although I am not sure how to do this via the directions. I think it would be beneficial to learn more about html and how to write code if you are indeed going to be adding these features into your Google Analytics tool.

As I discussed in the previous blog, understanding how much time people spend on your site is important in determining what you are doing right. The time spent can be found in your report for Google, and I have asked the report to let me know who visits the site and spends more than five minutes on the site. If I am posting information and people are only skimming over it, I may not be doing a very good job presenting the information (or I’ve not selected a very interesting topic). I have often visited a site and because the site wasn’t very organized, I immediately exit if I am unable to find what I’m looking for, so you definitely want to avoid that when you can and work to develop a site that people feel is useful.

In looking at a particular company’s Web site (let’s use Allstate in this case), establishing filters would also be beneficial. If I am understanding this correctly, I can exclude visitors from a specific domain (in this case allstate.com) so that my data is more accurate. If employees are using the site daily (even making it their home page), then including those visits would skew my data. In my own work, I do use our Web page daily and have it as my home page. When we are collecting data, we certainly wouldn’t want to include anyone in our office who is doing this or using it daily because that really makes a difference in our number of visits.

The whole concept of Google Analytics is pretty complicated, but certainly critical in developing your various marketing tools for your business/organization. For those who don’t work with this type of information often, it is probably a good idea to consult with an expert or your Web team to ensure that you are establishing the right parameters, goals and tracking information to get the most out of your reports.

Reference:

Google Analytics (2010). Conversion University. Retrieved February 7, 2010, from http://services.google.com/analytics/breeze/en/ga_intro/index.html