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.