Google Analytics offers a wide array of features to help optimize promotion of a blog or website provided you know which to focus on and how to use them. Given that a lot of this information can be overwhelming and a bit confusing, I would start off by taking some of the tutorials in the Analytics Education section. After watching two of the videos provided, I quickly realized that some of the features provided, while interesting, wouldn't be as useful for our websites or the needs of my business/department. For example, knowing what type of devices are accessing our site may not be necessary since our institution already has a mobile version of the site. However, if we were creating and app, this could be useful in knowing which if we should create it for iPhone or Android. Additionally, we are not selling a product or service and we have a stationary location, so knowing the geographic location information from analytics would not be useful. This information may be useful for our International Education Office, as it may reveal trends to offer more insight to which populations may require support in the future.
One of the features that would be very useful for our online media would be the demographics information offered in Google Analytics. Knowing trends related to age and gender populations could help us to better target our key markets. If we are trying to build followers in order to spread more information about the college, our department, and our services, knowing the demographic information could help us to better market to specific target groups. For example, if 18-24 year-olds are the main population, we may want to look at which classes are most popular for the age group and promote information related to that.
A few other features worth exploring would be in the benchmarking section, especially the channels grouping, as well as the behavior section. Knowing new vs. returning visitors related to the duration with which they are browsing my page may tell me if I'm succeeding in making the site interesting for returning visitors, or if I need to focus on what type and frequency of new information posted on the site. Fortunately, we have an office at our college that works with analyzing analytics for the college and department pages, however, knowing this information would be extremely helpful if working with them on revamping our webpage. I truly feel that exploring and learning about this information would help to better understand why certain practices are in place, and in what ways can we optimize our web presence not only through social networks, but our websites as well.
No comments:
Post a Comment