Learning to Use Google Analytics: A Hands-On Flop

  

   In the “About Me” section of this blog, you will see that I said that this blog will allow you to follow me as I falter, flop and flourish in the online world. Unfortunately, this week is one of those falters and flops. In the quest for full disclosure, here’s what happened…

   This week’s assignment was to generate traffic to our blogs and begin viewing data from Google Analytics (GA) that we installed. First and foremost, I’d like to disclose that I must have done something wrong when I installed my code for GA. Last week, I did a big push to send out the link to my blog to friends and family encouraging them to visit it and help me get some data to analyze. Many people did visit the site; however to my dismay my GA account is registering 3 visits. Not sure why?

   However, luckily Blogger also has analytics installed in their site so I was able to see that my friends and family had not let me down and I actually had 38 visitors with a big spike the day that I sent out the link which was June 21, 2012.

   This week in class we spent some time looking at other web analytic tools and comparing them to GA. My biggest takeaway is that there are a lot of programs out there and some are not as good as GA, but some compliment GA by allowing a deeper look into some areas. Therefore, for this week’s assignment I will be using the analytics from Blogger to compliment my lack of analytics from GA.

   The first report that I looked at was the Visitors Report. “This section provides information on visitor interaction with your site, the type of visitors, and information about how they are viewing your site” (Wells, 2012). Here’s a comparison of the data from both GA and Blogger.



   Since I am now a little more in tune with data and what it means, my first thought after comparing the two reports was about unique visitors, visits and page views “OMG, GA isn’t wrong Blogger is just counting me every time I log in and view.” However, I quickly disproved this when I had verification from at least 7 people who said that they visited my blog. [Darn, I had hoped maybe I didn’t mess it up for a second.] When I looked at the traffic sources, which tell you how people got to your site, I saw that Facebook was the number one source. This coincides with my big push to get users to visit.

   Had my GA been installed correctly, I would have been interested to see my Content Overview Report. This report shows the page views, unique page views, average time on page and bounce rate. The report below is puzzling to me when compared to the other GA reports, particularly Visitor Overview referenced above. The Visitor Overview report showed that I only had 3 unique visitors, so I was puzzled to see 4 unique pageviews on my content report. I’ll explore this further this week.  



   A Blogger report that would compliment my GA Content Report is Posts. Posts dig a little deeper into reporting and tell you the number of times each individual post has been viewed. This is helpful because GA just measures the main page for the blog not the individual blog postings. I was able to see that my first post “Achieving White Belt Status in Web Ninja Training” was my top visited post. This makes sense because the week that we launched our blogs we all shared our url’s with classmates and visited each other’s blogs. (See below)

   Needless to say, my data even combined from the two sites, is bleak. So, how am I going to fix it? The first thing that I am going to do is look into how to correct my code problem. By troubleshooting the error in reporting, hopefully I’ll be able to capture true data that will show a lot more traffic.  The next thing I am going to work on is driving traffic to my blog. Unfortunately, SEO and web metrics is not a hot topic that sharing with my friends would make my blog a success. So, this week I’m going to try to build viewership from my fellow IMC 642 classmates by adding a blogroll. A blogroll is “a list of other blogs that a blogger might recommend by providing links to them (usually in a sidebar list)” (Wikipedia, 2007). My hope is that by linking to other relevant blogs, their visitors will easily find my blog and check it out. I am also going to explore some of the design features that will make my blog more visually appealing and easier to share.

   As a self proclaimed novice user, I am not expecting my blog to blow up with visitors who keep coming back for more of my web analytics wisdom, but I am going to stay true to my goal which is to use it as a learning tool to break into the world of blogging and web analytics. Once I master these skills, I can then transfer them into a sexier topic like my “Lessons from Paula” blog that I plan to launch that will follow me on my journey of cooking my way through Paula Deen’s Southern Cooking Bible.

   Despite the claims that GA is easy to use, I have learned this week that getting the data that you need does not always work the first time and like many other things, sometimes you need to test, modify and reevaluate. I would not call this week a fail, because I got the code installed and knew enough to know what I didn’t know and that something was fishy.  Hopefully, next week I’ll be able to figure out what I did wrong and my data will start to flourish.

  

References:

Wells, M. (2012) Lesson 5: Google Analytics. IMC 642. P.I. Reed School of Journalism, WVU.

Wikipedia. (2007). Glossary of blogging. Wikipedia. Retrieved June 25, 2012 from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glossary_of_blogging