…”How about we share our documents for final presentation on Google Drive?”…
…”Fantastic idea, you all have Google right?”…”Of course.”…
All of a sudden, we all laughed at the way we talk about our Google accounts
I am glad to see you here, and you probably wonder what the word means. It says “DATA”, and of course the rest is just flowers as decoration.
Past two weeks my class has been talking about Google Analytics constantly, repetitively, and it is like non-stop reminds me of monitoring action. To be honest, when I first time installed Google Analytics Plugin to my site, I had no clue about what I was doing. I felt like sitting on a Big Story that I would never actually get the essence of it.
After running back and forth between YouTube videos and Google Analytics, I am presenting something reasonable and encouraging. As a beginner, I would use some basics to show my progress from January to current month, March.
Two lines represents the number of sessions that visitors create over time.
Sessions decreases from 317 to 225, which creates the dropping percentage of 29.02. Together with this dropping, users, pageviews and new sessions drop by relative small percentage. When I looked at these differences, I was very happy to experience the activities that happen on my site; whether it(any element) is increasing or decreasing, It means I have been improving in a relatively short period of time.
Specifically, I focus on how I could make my content better by providing more images, concepts, thoughts, and explanations with quality. Initially, I use avg. session duration and bounce rate as two primary measuring sticks. However, this video suggests that the avg. session duration could be really tricky; it is not like medium (value), it is mean (disproportion occurs frequently). The increasing bounce rate and Pages/ Session indicate that my content has been improved in a way that drives my visitors to read more.
I have never thought that I would know about this whole data collecting thing. I took this publishing course, and it did open lots of questions that lead to more questions.
Here are a few things that I have changed since I started my Google Analytics,
- Social media (Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Google+, Pinterest, RSS, emails etc) I have tried to keep consistency with my posts on my website, and use links and hashtags to increase my traffic.
- Use SEO to elevate my visibility on the Internet (This, again, leads to the previous topics about the distribution of information; the search engine helps the “buried” sites to show up again by using keywords, instance)
- I have created a Facebook Page for my website to promote within my friends & relatives’ circle
These are all some examples that I have done, and continue to modify and monitor constantly. The Google Analytics, in a weird way, is addictive; every morning, after checking my emails, social media platforms, brushing my teeth, I would go check out my website and Google Analytics. It reaches to a point that I want to see something different, whether it is good, or bad, it might just give me some clue to improve.
Another way to explain the importance/ role of social media is to show you this:
Google Analytics allow me to show this (pretty cool huh), you could see three primary gates for visitors: Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn. This makes sense to me. Okay, I admit, I use twitter 24/7, whether just checking news (CBC, NYT etc), trends and people that I have been following. That is why my No.1 stick to the public is ‘Twitter’.
This is fascinating, isn’t it. I get to know about these, and monitor people. (You could actually just sit in front of the screen and select the ‘Real Time’ section to see readers who are visiting at the moment [funny thing mentioned by my TA, Mike]). Feel kind of authority watching people in the morning with my cereal, why don’t you try it out too in the morning?!
I guess these are all awesome examples that I could come up with for now. Here are some of my friends’ suggestions:
