Blog 3 | Week 5 | Web Analytics
This blog covers topics discussed during week five, which relates to web analytics, Google Analytics, and web metrics. Complementing materials and readings will be included in each section as well as my thoughts on how they relate to lectures and assignment three.
Choosing an Organization
The organization that I chose to investigate was the Center for the Integration of Research, Teaching, and Learning, or CIRTL (pronounced as sir-tuhl). It doesn't have its own site, rather it has 16 subdomains on the Academic Affairs website. I used a custom dashboard to look at just the CIRTL pages and also used Google Analytics to see the relationship CIRTL has with its parent organization. The CIRTL program is relatively new to UArizona (in its second year) so it was a good one to pick to see progress between year one and year two.
Google Analytics
I build websites and am a little familiar with Google Analytics. I've never used Adwords before because my websites are for non-ecommerce organizations. I started my report with high-level snapshots just to see the comparisons between last year and this year.
A common pitfall is not knowing the difference between pageviews and unique pageviews. The staff at bounteous.com state that it's better to use unique pageviews as a metric. So that's what I did. Just to clarify, this is how it works. If the same user visits a page twice during a session, then the pageview count increases by two. Unique pageviews will only increase once if a user views the page, leaves, and returns to view the page again in the same session.
Then I did some audience analysis, where I discovered that a lot of visitors were from Lexington, Kentucky. This was odd, but after consulting with the CIRTL program director, she mentioned that other Universities will visit the site for inspirational ideas. Thus, it is helpful to be able to go back to the organization and ask them to help make sense of the information that is formed from the data.
User engagement is one of those terms that is relatively new but is for something that always existed, like clicking and filling out forms. It is the key though, to decreasing the bounce rate, which CIRTL rated at 54%. The rate seemed a bit high until I researched it further. According to customedialabs, the average bounce rate for non-ecommerce content sites is between 35-60%.
The bounce rate is the most popular Key Performance Indicator (KPI) for web metrics and the other two that I used were pages per session and average session duration. According to Modgirl Marketing, the average time that someone spends on a page is between 2-3 minutes. There are tons of research, articles, and blogs that reference common KPI metrics for websites, and they have standard ranges for categories of organizations. When there is not any historical data to compare, it can be useful to compare to industry standards.
I didn't have access to Search Engine Optimization metrics on Google Analytics. I tried to enable it, but didn't have administrator access to do this. Did anyone else have certain areas blocked?
After summarizing the findings, the recommendations are pretty general. Everyone wants to attract more people to their sites, have them engage, and not have them leave so quickly. Embedding a YouTube video rather than linking to it can have a beneficial impact to KPI metrics. Another common advice is to incorporate live chat. Stacey Upfalow has more ideas on her blog, "What is User Engagement and How to Improve it."
Google Analytics is a fantastic tool for gathering, analyzing, and reporting website productivity and for figuring out the five Ws of what are people doing on the site; who are they; when are they visiting; where are they from, and why are they accessing the site. The next step is to tweak some things on the site and reassess goals. Then the web analytics cycle repeats.
Well thanks for reading my blog. I look forward to reading your comments and your blogs too.
References:
Staff (2015). Common Reporting Pitfalls in Google Analtyics. Bounteous. Available at: https://www.bounteous.com/insights/2015/12/21/common-reporting-pitfalls-google-analytics
Staff (2021). The Truth About KPIs: Bounce Rate. Edge of the Web. Blog. Available at: https://www.edgeoftheweb.co.uk/blog/website-kpis-bounce-rate
Upfalow, S. (2021). What is User Engagement and How to Improve it. Taboola. Available at: https://blog.taboola.com/what-is-user-engagement/
Graphics labeled in Google usage rights as free Creative Commons license. Available at: https://www.flickr.com/photos/beantin/7649183772/in/photostream/ and https://pxhere.com/en/photo/1453693
Hello Kat,
ReplyDeleteYour blog was very insightful and very informative. I would have definitely fallen for the common pitfall since I didn't even know there was a difference. The unique page view makes way more sense to use since it seems like a more accurate measure. Overall, web analytics is an interesting tool especially since this was my first real exposure to it but I plan on learning more about it.
I'm so glad I read about the pitfalls before diving into my assignment because I based most of the analysis on the unique page views. I'm so grateful for Google for making this tool!
DeleteThank you for sharing your personal experience using Google Analytics for your website. Great information on common pitfall and explaining the difference between pageview and unique pageview. Lots of valuable information I was not aware of.
ReplyDeleteThanks so much Malav!!
DeleteYour blog provides interesting details and summary related to assignment 2 . Interesting to read about sir-tuhl organization. Good to learn about your experience related to building Custom dashboard to look at CIRTL pages and google analytics to find the useful matrix. Thanks for explaining pageview and unique page views differences in details and some of the concepts are unique.Explained all the findings in details and provide recommendations including live chat and YouTube videos.
ReplyDeleteThanks Pushpa. I guess my recommendations were too generic in my report. Our IT department wants us to link out to various place instead of embedding them because of security reasons. It's hard to balance having a secure website and wanting to increase user engagement also. The only other solution I can think of is to incorporate survey analytics from vendors like Qualtrics or Survey Monkey when we do need to link off our sites.
DeleteWOW Kat! Fantastic informative synopsis of module 2. Also, the article you provided was interesting on how it focused on user engagement, and understanding how your users engage with your site can benefit the business. Well done!
ReplyDeleteThanks Adrienne! I like your blog as well!
DeleteKat, this blog is very informative and gives a great example of how web analytics should be done. In the behavior flow, I thought the idea of recommending the CITRL director add a quick survey or Follow us on Twitter button was great. It somehow inspired me to think of how I should always try to find the opportunity to get user/viewer to be engaged in my work or product rather than just let them pass through.
ReplyDeleteHi Leon! I found out that our IT unit wants us to get people to pass through sometimes (for security reasons). It's a balancing act for sure.
DeleteHello Kat, thanks for sharing your personal experience with the lectures and what your learned with them. You summary of the material we covered in this module is excellent, especially regarding the "What is User Engagement and How to Improve it." informational blog; I appreciate the links you shared.
ReplyDelete