by Google Analytics
By: Kyra Flynn, Molly Kavanaugh, Jaden Watkins, and Abigail Portwood
In class on Monday, March 2nd Kelli Matthews dove into the logistics and significance of Google Analytics for companies. She began the lecture by pointing out Google Analytics from three frames; understanding, interpreting, and analyzing. Furthermore, Kelli explained the “buckets”, one of them being the analysis of how people are getting to the website and the other being the measure of activity. One of the goals for analysis is how to take the data and make insights and changes. A shared goal is the overall increase in visitors to the website, an increase of return visitors, and increases in time spent on the site.
A key takeaway that we got out of this lecture was the importance of following your target audience to see what works and what doesn’t. Tracking how people move through your site and using forms of arrivals and departures help us learn more about this target audience. One form of departure she discussed was bounce rates, which presents the percentage of visitors who leave after only seeing one page.
Additionally, we discussed the importance of setting goals related to what you want people to view and interact with when they engage in your platform. Understanding how to take data, draw insights, and take actionable recommendations is a key foundation of how to set goals when using Google Analytics. Increasing engagement features including traffic, referrals from social media, return visitors, and time on your site along with decreasing bounce rates are some of the common for increasing engagement on one’s website or platform.
We concluded the lecture by discussing how to understand the content our users are viewing. By looking at which site sections and folders do best, where people come into our sites, and where people leave our sites, we can further understand content traffic. In-page analytics can help to determine audience behavior and interpret what changes need to be made in order to increase website traffic. Google Analytics is a part of the key framework needed to build a successful site. By understanding, interpreting, and analyzing analytics, you can create a successful site.
