This blog entry discusses the three successfully created
goals, as well as the one failed attempt.
I will also discuss the information that can be learned from each.
Goals set up for this blog site include:
- Page visits greater than one
- Site visit duration greater than two minutes
- Click on “About Michelle” link
- Register to “Follow by Email”
Page visits greater than one
This goal measures the number of visits where a person
opened more than one page. When setting
up this goal, the reasoning was that in order to see an entire blog post, the
visitor must click on the “Read More” link, therefore visiting at least two
pages during their visit. This goal will
estimate the number of visitors who read, at lease, one complete blog post.
Theoretically, your number of visits with more than one page
view should be about the same as your number of visitors, especially in a
situation when the visitor must click a link for a new page as soon as he/she
determines they’re ready to continue reading the post. If this number is relatively low, this likely
means that the user was not intrigued enough by the content they landed on to
bother reading more.
After reviewing the Google Analytics results from my blog,
I’m finding that everyone who has visited the blog site has visited more than
one page during their visit. I’m pleased
to see these results as I believe it means that the content I’ve provided is
substantial enough that it is maintaining the attention of visitors. At least, that’s what I believe until I take
a closer look at the results from the next goal.
Site visit duration greater than two minutes
This goal records the number of site visits that lasted more
than two minutes. In an attempt to
determine how many visitors are reading at least one blog post, this goal was
created. The average reader can read and
understand about 200 – 250 words per minute (How fast, n.d.), with blog posts
averaging 500 words, most visitors will need anywhere from two to
two-and-a-half minutes in order to read and process one complete blog post.
If visitors are not staying on your site long enough to read
the content that you are providing, that says (rather clearly) that the content
is not appealing or useful to them. On
the flip side of that argument, returning visitors should not be on the site an
excessive amount of time. If new
visitors are staying on the site for extended periods of time that seem a bit
unreasonable, it could mean that the blog archive section is too difficult to
navigate. This could signify a layout
issue if it is too high, or a content concern if it is too low.
After reviewing the results from this particular goal, I
started to get a little concerned about the content provided on my blog. Only 50% of those people who have visited my
site have remained on the site for longer than two minutes. This tells me that the visitors who did not
stay long enough to finish reading the blog posts were turned off my some
aspect of the full post, whereas the teaser entry has been successful in
grabbing attention. I’m wondering if the
content is not what these visitors are seeking or if the posts are too long,
after all, “people in general (and especially on the web) are short on
attention and patience (MalleckDesign, n.d.).”
Click on “About Michelle” link
This is a URL Destination type goal, with the target URL
housed within the blog’s domain.
Visitors that click this link are likely a bit more engaged than the
average visitor and are exhibiting some basic loyalty behavior. These visitors probably want to know more about
the author of the blogs because they are finding value in the content provided
by the author.
Clearly, I have found the visitors to my blog site are not
terribly interested in learning more about me; only 12.5% of the visitors have
actually looked at this particular page.
Register to “Follow by Email”
This goal is a URL Destination type, with a target URL being
housed outside the domain of the blog.
This goal will measure the number of people interested enough in the
blog content that they are willing to share their email address, opening
themselves up to one more email on a regular basis.
While the setup of this particular goal was a failure, I
felt it was important to share as a learning opportunity. When I saw the data on this goal, I was very
concerned that the goal had not been set up correctly. This prompted me to test the settings by
going to the blog site and signing up for the blog. I never saw the results in the data. The lesson learned here is that not seeing
the data that you’re hoping to see does not necessarily mean you and
failed. For me, it meant assessing the
goal itself and trying different setups in an effort to correct the issue.
Filter
I have set up a filter on the Google Analytics account for
work. The filter is designed to remove
as many of the employees as possible.
This was important to me because the firm where I work has the IT
department default Internet Explorer to open the company website when you open
the program. The filter has successfully
removed unnecessary data from the analytics results. Further, because of the way this was set up,
I am not only able to remove the employee visits from the results I typically
view. In addition, I am able to view the
pages that the internal employees are visiting.
References
MalleckDesign.com.
(n.d.). Set goals or die. Retrieved June 24, 2012, from http://www.malleckdesign.com/blog/set-goals-or-die
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