Module 2

 Hi Everyone. What a crazy time to be taking classes. The election and covid and everything is just insane. This week we covered something I've always wanted to dive into but never really had a chance. I've done a ton of work with web-apps and web development but these are normally admin portals will relatively few users. I've never developed a website that had thousands of users and been able to really reap the benefits from a google analytics page. This is certainly a lesson/tool I'm going to be using a ton moving forward as I cannot believe how much analysis I was able to do from just looking at google's little merchandise store.

First I wanna talk about the lecture proper. Web Analytics certainly goes hand in hand with big-data, business intelligence and makes perfect sense why it was slotted into this course. The types of web traffic make sense to me. Organic traffic seems to be the goal that everybody wants. Search Engine Optimization I know is a huge field. I also know that people sometimes use nefarious ways to increase their search engine results. The other forms of traffic seem important too but I can't imagine they make up a significant amount of traffic for any site. Does anybody have an example to disagree? I'd love to hear about it. I thought the Who/What/When/Where/Why analysis was pretty humorous. That's the same analysis they teach you to do when writing your first book report in 5th grade. However, if you really think about it, it's not all that different.

I didn't know what a bounce rate versus exit rate was before this week. I'm glad I learned the difference. Google's commerce shop had an absurdly high bounce rate. It led me to theorize that the google commerce shop sees a high number of misclicks. If not, then I'm not sure what what causes them to have a bounce rate so high. I can't think of a time I clicked on a shop and then left within 10 seconds without clicking anything. It all just seems bizarre to me.

The key performance indicators in Google Analytics additionally is interesting. I like how you can set your own goal and conversions. In my report I focused on revenue but I imagine for other sites that revenue might not be as important. 

For this week I wanted to research how to reduce bounce rate. I found a semi-recent article talking about some methods to help retain users on your site. Some of them are pretty straight forward, but some of them I have never thought of before. Here is a list of them all summarized:

1. Ensure your landing page content is interesting
2. Increase your website loading speed.
3. Ensure you have credibility
4. Get creative.

I recommenced you go read Syed Balkhi's full article. I know I will be reading more about bounce rate and exit rate in the future. ECommerce is only going to get bigger!

Sources:

Balkhi, Syed. “How to Reduce Bounce Rate and Increase Your Conversions.” Ad Age, 1 July 2019, adage.com/article/industry-insights/how-reduce-bounce-rate-and-increase-your-conversions/2180666.