MIS

4352
March 2015

Google Web Analytics: Personal Blog Analysis
MIS 4352
Caroline Personius

Introduction

Profiles Filters Users:

1. All Website Data
a. No filters
2. Homework
a. Include only traffic to the Hostname
b. Force Request URI Lowercase
c. Force Campaign Medium Lowercase
3. In Class Exercises
a. Exclude Google store
b. Exclude specific IP addresses
c. Predefined hostnames
4. Added Users
a. Webanalytics.utd@gmail.com
b. Permissions Read & Analyze

When I originally created the Hostname filter under the
Homework Filters profile, exclude only was chosen instead of
include only. For this reason, the data from the first few blog
post campaigns didnt reflect the actual visits. To remedy that, I
have used the All Web Site Data profile filtered using advanced
segments to show only campaign traffic for this report, to give a more accurate analysis.

Analysis

Audience Overview


First, I compared all sessions to only email sessions
using segments. In the beginning, a lot more sessions came
from other sources, such as referral or direct, than from
email. Toward the end of the campaign time however, the
overall sessions and email session numbers much more
closely matched. Second, I looked at the total numbers of
sessions compared with sessions from the email campaign:
186 sessions were started total, but only 67 came from email.
However, the percentage of new sessions was significantly
higher for the email campaign, 71.6%, than for all new sessions, 27.9%.

Another interesting aspect was the rate of returning to new visitors based on all sessions or
email sessions. Most of the sessions on the blog were from returning visitors, but most of the
sessions started from the email campaign were new visitors, meaning that each blog post reached a

MIS 4352
March 2015

new audience, and that audience continued to check back on their own after they received the
original email campaign link.

Finally, the audience overview showed that 54% of all sessions and 0% of email sessions
came from Russia. However, 45% of all sessions in the United States were from other mediums, and
67% of U.S. visitors found the blog through the email campaign.

Engagement Report

Because the site being analyzed was a
blog, user engagement seemed fairly low. This
was evidenced by page depth being only one for a
vast majority of sessions. Only a few sessions
went beyond one page, through a few did get as
far as six pages in depth. Furthermore, the session
duration was from 0-10 seconds for most of the sessions,
showing low involvement with the content. A few
sessions did last as long as several minutes.

Frequency & Recency

The Count of Sessions table shows that most of
the visitors that came to the blog because of the email
campaign only came once, while a few came twice, and a
surprising number visited as many as 15-25 times.

Days Since Last Session is a little trickier. Since
users who only visit the site once show up under 0 Days
since Last Session it came seem like a lot of people came
to the blog very recently even though they havent. On
the whole, the number of people who have visited the
site recently is relatively low: only three people have visited in the last day, while eight people
visited four or more days ago.

Conclusion


From the data, considering that this site was a blog, and not an ecommerce site that has real
marketing campaigns, the email campaign seemed reasonably successful. The percentage of new
users was very high from the email campaign, and relatively low from all sessions. The email
campaign also brought a lot of new visitors to the blog, compared with all sessions where most of
the visitors were returning. In that sense, the campaign helped bring new traffic to the site more
than referrals, organic, or direct sources. Unfortunately, user engagement was very low,
considering that most people only visited the site once, and didnt check back very often. The
bounce rates were also high, but since blogs are usually viewed regularly and therefore only viewed
on the most recent page, this is to be expected.

If analysis and marketing for this site were to be continued in the future, the blog should
probably be changed to have more advertisements or interactive links to engage users more.
Additionally, future campaigns should probably be worded to draw in more new users, by showing
them how the site could help and benefit them or is relatable in some way to their daily lives. It
would also be interesting to post and run campaigns on blog posts with different subjects, and see
which posts people click on more, to show what type of content they are interested in, and thus
direct the topic of the blog posts so as to attract more users.