Week 15 Assignment, Part 1

How to begin? I'm not sure. This course has opened my mind to many aspects of online computing to promote my future business endeavors. I believe that it is only at this point in my knowledge that I can comment on analytics. For the sake of discussions, I linked Google Analytics to my hobby blog as that blog has a history of traffic that would give me a good amount of data to analyze. Enjoy!

While touring my Google Analytics account information, I found the following four types of reports. Each of these reports have their own overviews and sub-data available. They are: Audience reports, Acquisition reports, Behavior reports and Conversion reports. Once I digested the definitions of each one of these data sets, I believe that the two most important ones for me at this time are the Acquisition and Behavior reports.

Since I have my blog page, Facebook, Twitter, Google+ and Instagram accounts all for the express purpose of promoting my blog page and my written work, having the Acquisition report is a good one to focus on. By learning where my major audience traffic comes from I can choose to double down on that entry portal. I could also take a different tact and beef up my work with the other portals to try and improve their numbers. With the limited time available for me to do the work of promoting my blog, I think I hybrid approach of focusing on one low performing portal at a time and making small changes to the way I use that social media platform is the best compromise approach. Small changes can be tracked for impact much easier than wholesale revisions of my methodology and therefore easier to analyze to see if what I am doing is working.

The Behavior report is one that will let me focus on how my audience is receiving my content. Since my product is only my limited iPhone photography and my thoughts as expressed in my blog posts, having this data is vital to adjusting my writing style. Using the rudimentary tools available to any blogger user, I was able to see that blog posts with pictures had more visits than those without. I adjusted my content creation method to include extra time for story telling using pictures. With the additional horsepower of the Google Analytics data, I should be able to make other content changes to continue to hone my writing skills. Getting users to my blog is important as I desire to share my stories with the world, but my preference is to make meaningful contact with users and hence I'd rather have a few readers that hang onto my every world than thousands of followers that only stay for a second or two.

For the next part of this week's assignment, those are the areas I will really pay attention to. See you around!