For this week’s process post, I will be talking about the various data that we have collected so far to date and trying to make sense of it.
Upon opening Google Analytics, we are greeted with our home page, and what has occurred within the past 7 days. I quickly changed it to the past 90 days to get an accurate sense of what occurred during the whole semester.
According to the analytics software, 102 users including myself have visited my website. What this means is that everyone in the class has possibly visited my website at least once in this class.
The average engagement time, which means the time that they spend on the website is at a whopping low of 34 seconds, but I think these results may be skewed since I frequently visit and leave my own website.
Furthermore, the plugins I am running could be responsible for this low average engagement time. The reason why I suspect this is because of what I noticed when I looked at the demographic by country.
Going to the reports snapshot we find that 80 of the users are from the United States, while only 20 are from Canada, and 2 from India. If all the visits were from our classmates, then it would be more skewed towards Canada rather than the United States. This is accounting even for the fact that there are international students who may be from the United States and are using a US phone plan.
Another thing that was interesting was that most of the sessions were driven by directly clicking on the link, which means that it was most likely spread through word of mouth.
My website seemed to have surged in traffic from when it was made, and then declined before keeping a decent plateau.
All in all, I think that analytics are a great way to inform content creators like me about potential trends and audiences. This can inform how you optimize your SEO (Search Engine Optimization), as “SEO is the most viable and cost-effective way to both understand and reach customers in key moments that matter” (Hollingsworth, 2018). If a business is trying to make money, understanding your audience, and optimizing your SEO so your website is at the top of search results can mean the difference between making money and making lots of money. However, as we have found out here, they can be inaccurate to some degree, and you should not take the information given as 100% truth.
References:
Hollingsworth, Sam. April 13, 2018. “12 Reasons Why You Business Absolutely Needs SEO.” https://www.searchenginejournal.com/why-seo-is-important-for-business/248101/#close