Week 15: Weebly Site

For my last post, I would like to invite everyone to view my Weekly site! On their you will find some personal information if you wanted to know a little more about me!

Hopefully you learned more about web analytics throughout the semester as I enjoyed sharing my understanding! I want to wish you all good luck with the rest of your schooling and whatever the future may entail!

Below is a snapshot and link of the site I created!

alexschram.weeblysite.com

Week 14: Using Web Analytics

Over the several past weeks I have touched on many important topics relating to web analytics, and today I will gather some of the takeaways from my posts. Analyzation of data is essential to the decision making process. Understanding key performance indicators and watching trends help content creators and businesses worldwide predict for future events. Why is that important? This is because future success is ultimately unpredictable holding some level of risk. Although, by using web analytics tools available to you, you will greatly decrease those risks.

Content creators or entrepreneurs, they are the same! Both have to spend mass amounts of time researching data while aiming to integrate something unique in the market. Furthermore, examples of unique value are artificial intelligence aids in your product/service. Not only does it follow a trend, but the use of AI is still has room for expansion in the technology industry. Web analytics allows you to see the hard data, where you can make your presence more relevant! Whether it be low organic traffic rates or low keyword search ranking, the earlier discovered the better. Optimizing your content and brand to the best of your ability is extremely difficult without fully understanding what is happing to your site and possibly why. Overall, web analytics serves many functions and is one of the most important tools to utilize. The data doesn't lie!

Week 13: Strengths of Using AI

This week I will dive deeper into the benefits of having artificial intelligence. For starters, AI is commonly liked for the fact that humans will no longer have to complete mundane tasks. The automation of these time consuming tasks allows for your business to have a much higher rate of productivity as time can be well spent on other aspects. Efficiency and productivity are two large functions in the business world. AI technology is great for analyzing mass amounts of data and processing it with speed and ease. Meaning that this technology does not produce errors. This is a great pivot point for some businesses because some incur large errors ultimately costing the company thousands.

Its interesting to see where AI is being commonly used. Here are a few examples of which industries are implementing this technology.

• Healthcare
• Education
• Small businesses 
• Education 
• Marketing
• E-commerce 

Having an entrepreneurial mindset is key for production of content because of the designed thinking. Where creativity, innovation and purpose all meet the vision of the final product. It will be interesting to see how AI shifts in the coming years as we all know there will soon be more and more AI being implemented into automobiles!

Week 12: Artificial Intelligence

Technology has continuously been a growing aspect in as engineers are always looking to make more features while increasing speed. This can be see in Apple iPhones as the product has progressed over the years. Newer technology, such as artificial intelligence is a large opportunity to perfect. Companies like Tesla are striving to implement their auto-pilot feature into their vehicles, but there is one question at hand. Is it truly beneficial to have such a feature as safety is a large downfall?

 What is artificial intelligence? It is the development of computer programming used to perform tasks of human intelligence. This technology is fairly new to us and it is highly useful because it makes human life more efficient. The fight against artificial intelligence primarily stems from privacy issues and errors of AI. Society is not comfortable with the fact that people may be sleeping at the wheel while traveling at 70 miles per hour. 

Artificial intelligence is a very interesting topic to look at and even to consider depending on your type of business. Tesla has more capability than they have showed the public, but is everyone ready to see such a mind-blowing change become a part of daily life? AI is definitely something to watch as your business grows as all hints point towards a technology dependent future!

Week 11: Understanding Referral Spam

Referral spam is fake success that is supposed to make your website look more appealing or legitimate to visitors. How does it happen? Typically the person conducting this spam will make a ton of website requests using a fake referral URL to bring "more traffic" to the desired website. This is definitely something to protect yourself from just in case you are caught in the eyes of a spammer. Here are a few solutions:

• Password protected areas (non-public) 
• Robot Exclusion 
• Nofollow value to links
• Blacklist IP
• Other filters/blocks

The last thing a site owner needs is to lose credibility due to referral spam. This is in fact a perfect example on how google analytics or site statistics can be polluted. Make sure you take the precautions necessary to protect your content and allow yourself to see true progress! Similarly to referral spam, there is also other forms of spam. Bot spam can be dangerous as well because these bots are designed to gather information from websites, social media, emails etc. It is very important to watch your site traffic as this activity can be noticed quickly. Below is a great view of what referral spam may look like. 

Week 10: Studying Trends

What is trend analysis? Trend Analysis is the practice of studying an aspect of performance to help predict future events in order to prepare for positive and negative results. The one fault of this concept is the risk taken. By acting on previous data, there are numerous influencers as to the reason of that success. Therefore, there is a level of risk taken when acting upon trend analysis (especially more so in the stock market).

Studying trends in content creation differs slightly. Some common aspects that are watched are traffic sources, type of market, sales performance etc. It is important to study trends in your business whether it is short-term or long-term, you can optimize your content to become more valuable to the publics eye.


Trends gives content creators a better direction of where things are going downhill. And the longer the trend sustains, the more notable the trend becomes. Great thinkers are always two steps ahead. You can also be two steps ahead by looking at trends and making insightful predictions of whats to come!

Week 9: Types of Search Traffic

Today I will be defining and explaining the significance of a few different types of search traffic. Organic Search Traffic is one area that allows creators to see if their content is trending or popular. What is it? Organic Search traffic is the result of search engine results that is unpaid, in other words, it is earned traffic. It is commonly stressed to attempt to increase your organic traffic being that it is a main channel as well as the most natural.

Another channel is direct traffic. This is traffic generated through unknown sources. Examples of this would be traffic from saving the URL, bookmarking a site, adding the site to favorites on a browser or even sharing website links through emails. By using tools such as google analytics, they automatically track the sources of traffic, and if no source is found it becomes classified as direct traffic.

Paid search traffic is very straight forward, meaning that visits came from paid advertising of the website owner. How does this work? Often times, websites have paid advertisements appear at the top of searches with the help of Google AdWords. This system has creators pay for their advertising to appear given certain keyword searches. Note that paid search traffic can come from many platforms, as Google is a common example. Keep an eye out for these traffic trends, especially after major changes or new content is published!

Week 7: Trends and Relevance

Keeping up with trends can be a huge advantage for content creators because it can generate more traffic as well as keep the content relevant. Here are a few simple ways to stay updated on trends:

• Follow/Subscribe to other content creators
• Use industry tools (ex. Google trends) 
• Read up on large brands 
• Network and communicate with peers in the industry

As I have mentioned in previous posts, Google Analytics offers incredible data to answer nearly every question regarding your website. You can even change date ranges to see the influence of change over a certain period if desired. This allows you to see trends within your audience, but it is also important to look "big picture". 

Investing time into keeping up to date with trends helps creators make the adjustments needed, and also provides a little direction of what content is relevant. Additionally, using tools such as Google Analytics or optimizesmart.com are great for answering any question regarding your website such as exit rate. Trends can be tricky depending on the audience, but staying ahead of the trend curve is a huge competitive advantage! 

Week 6: Significance of Keywords

Today I would like to discuss the importance of of keywords and what role they play. Keywords are a huge factor in search engine ranking. Depending on what the user searches for, the keywords used in the search applies to the content of each website creator, thus ranks each site. The sites with high rankings are placed at the top of your search. How does this relate to keywords? Keywords are a significant factor in for browser search results. 

What is an organic search? An organic search is an unpaid search result based on keywords of the search, links and other factors. Websites like Facebook are using PPC advertising which is the exact opposite of an organic search. Organic searches are important because they are relevant and interested users. Meaning, the searcher is looking for content or products relevant to yours. On the other hand, PPC advertising can sometimes bring users that are completely uninterested to your website. These are some key factors to understand and monitor for generating traffic and business. 

Week 5: Why Hits Are Important

Most people would assume a hit means that a user has visited the page. Hits vary from visits because hits refer to the download of files on the website. A file on the website could be as simple as the photos used or files/buttons in the navigation bar. Therefore, having a high hit per visit rate is a great piece of information that can be seen through Google Analytics.



Owners are even able to track information on these hits. Demographics of users and website behavior allows you to see key information about your audience and further expanding your understanding of the users of your site. One great example of this is how Facebook has been tracking user activity/information to provide advertisements based on the data collected. This strategy is a little more advanced, but the process of tracking hits is still displayed.

Web analytics offers additional help to start-up sites and even well developed ones (Example: Facebook). Tracking hits is one of many strategies that contribute to the strong relationship between website and user.

Week 4: Analyze and Optimize With Analytics Trends

Gathering important statistics of your website helps make your site appeal to all intended audiences and platforms. From my experience, I have entered multiple websites with difficult navigation on a mobile platform compared to desktop. Therefore, data suggesting heavy desktop users may incline site owners to adjust their setup or strategy. Here are some of the most insightful performance indicators:

• Unique website visitors
• Bounce rate
• Average time on page
• Platform used
• Top exit pages (etc.)

Each performance indicator offers insightful knowledge that helps creators eliminate a weakness on their website. Note that monitoring how many users access your website is not a significant statistic. Sure, it is the general indicator that displays if traffic is trending upwards or downwards, but there are many factors that influence overall traffic. 

Therefore, monitoring multiple insightful performance indicators allows you to full understand which areas you struggle in and which you see success. Using web analytics to optimize your website will help you be more efficient and effective in the pursuit of better performance. 

Week 3: Boosting Site Traffic With Analytics

One of the best parts of using Google Analytics is the ability to see what changes were most impactful. With such access to a variety of site statistics, managing websites to grow into popular flows of traffic becomes a little easier. Needless to say the process is still challenging with a number of other factors such as trends or content. 

Google Analytics reports helps site owners understand their target audience better which is a key part of connecting to those interested. For example, The Audience Overview Report shows all of the following: 

• Demographics
• Geo
• Behavior
• Mobile 
• Cross-Device
• Benchmarking (etc.)

Relating well with your target audience is a great place to start when looking to increase traffic. Also, making the adjustments based on the data above will help expand the reach of your content. This is because of search engine ranking, where popular sites appear near the top of searches in browsers. 

Note that there are other great web analytics tools such as Spring Metrics that offer similar data. Web analytics provides very useful information to help site owners generate more traffic. The example provided above is just one commonly used report, therefore, there is plenty of data available out there in order to achieve your goals!

Week 2: Google Analytics Certification

Understanding the basics of how Google Analytics works and where some key filters/functions are located is a great start towards becoming advanced in web analytics. Getting the Google Analytics Certification is a major addition to the resume for students looking to excel. The exams contain valuable information regarding the setup, basic functions and more. The content of the questions were not extremely challenging given that the student reviews the videos/information.

Nonetheless, I got a general understanding after briefly reviewing information. With a little more time and effort, achieving this certification will be very likely while learning more specified information.  I got a 68% on my first attempt which isn't so bad for a quick introduction.

The certification covers and introduction chapter, the interface, basic reports and basic campaign/conversion tracking which allows students to fully understand how Google Analytics works. Also, there is and advanced assessment available once the beginners section is completed. Overall, the certification and knowledge is a great opportunity for anyone looking to strengthen their skills and add value to their resume.

Week 1: Importance of Web Analytics

8/31/19

Analytical data helps businesses and individuals form better ideas to solve problems in the decision making process. This information is easily attainable, which typical measures things such as clicks, visits or other key performance indicators. Google offers their own program of tools in place as well as other great tools such as clickstream.com.



What is measured for web analytics?

• Time on page
• Site visits/page visits
• Clicks
• Direct Traffic 
• Transactions (etc.) 

With the worlds changing needs and the switch to demanding more technology, there must also be a demand for people with skillsets dependent on the world wide web. Therefore, it is predictable that fields such as digital marketing or social media marketing are ranked highly for the skillsets they include. For example, digital marketing requires basic soft and hard skills along with highly desired skills such as business analysis or competitive strategies. Overall, staying ahead of competition and making adjustments quickly are key processes derived from web analytics that will help sustain business.



https://www.usability.gov/what-and-why/web-analytics.html