Conversion Tracking

The weebly site I created, that was mentioned in the previous blog post, has now been published. The next step is to link Google Analytics to my website. Once I link Weebly and Google Analytics, I will be able to track the submission forms that come into my site. The process for linking the two is not complicated but there are a few steps involved.

To begin, you need to log-in to your Google Analytics account. Then you need to create a new account. To create a new account you go to admin  and then under the account tab you click on the pull down bar. Once the list pops up you click create new account. You are then prompted to fill in some boxes. The first one you fill in is your account name. Your account name should be a phrase that helps you identify what account you're looking at. Then you set up a website name. The website name name should be specific enough that you can differentiate it from all your other accounts. Then you copy and paste your URL form your website into the website URL space. After you do these three things you can click get tracking code at the bottom of the page. Once you get the tracking code, you should copy it so you can paste it into Weebly.

Now you need to go to Weebly and click on settings. Under the settings section you then click on SEO. Once you have done this, you then paste your tracking code into the footer code box and hit save. For the code to be applied you have to publish your site again. 

The next stop for my project was to track conversions. To do this, you have to go back to Google Analytics and set up a goal. Again, you go to Admin and then under view you click goals. Once you click goals there is a red box you can click on at the top of the screen that says "create new goal". You have to first type in your goal description. The description should be something that represents what you are tracking, for this case I used "Contact Information Obtained". Then you select the type of goal you want, which for me was destination. I used destination because I wanted to know when people reached a certain page, or made it to the correct destination. The next step is adding the actual goal destination. For this part you just take the link from your site, which for mine was http://ericakotsovos.weebly.com/thank-you.html, and paste it into the destination box. However, since  I already connected Weebly and Google Analytics all I needed to paste was the part after the .com. So I copied /thank-you.html into my destination box. 

Once you have done these steps you can verify your goal to make sure it works. If everything looks good, then you can save your goal and Google will start tracking it. After all this, you are finally done!

Google Analytics page showing conversion tracking

Weebly

This weeks assignment was to create a Weebly account. The end goal of creating a Weebly was to be able to track submission forms through Google Analytics. The Weebly site could be about anything we wanted it to be about. Some of my classmates had very interesting ideas like a website for travel and a website for movies. It is interesting to see how you can use a site like Weebly to make so many different types of websites. When you set up your account you can choose from many different themes. They have several different presets you can choose from. These presets range from a restaurant tailored background to a galaxy space background. Once you choose the background you can begin creating your site. You are able to change the colors and text styles. You can add applications, boxes, and images for free. You are also able to make purchases which allow you to make a more professional looking website.

Personally, I find Weebly a little more complicated to use then Wix. With Wix you have a more user friendly experience. You are able to move things around how you want them to be. Whereas in Weebly you have to follow the setup they have. Weebly is definitely still a good website to use, I just found it more complicated. Wix offers all of the same things that Weebly offers, with in-site purchases as well as free applications. 

For my Weebly account I made a Food, Fashion, & Beauty site. I created a homepage, an about me page, a blog page, and a contact page. The main goal, as I said before, was to be able to track the submission forms on the contact page. We had to set up a "thank you" screen as well. Once a person submits the form, they are supposed to be redirected to a "thank you" page. It was really interesting to learn the process of doing this because I always thought it was really complicated. The truth is, figuring out this kind of stuff is really interesting and makes visiting other websites more exciting. Once you learn how to set up a website, you can actually better understand all that goes into making some of your favorite stores' websites. 

The next step in creating my Weebly account is to connect it to Google Analytics. I will be learning how to do this within the next few days. It will be nice to actually be able to track submission forms to the website though Google Analytics. I know that I will have to set up a goal through Google Analytics in order for it to actually track what I want it too.  

This is what my Weebly homepage looks like!

Blogger Statistics

Blogger allows you to view statistics about your blog. When you click on the stats button you can get an overview, or look at specific posts, as well as view traffic sources, and look at your audience. It is important to know where your viewers are coming from, especially if your blog is business related. You obviously want to post about things that are relevant to where your audience is from because interests vary depending on where a person is from. Knowing your page views is also a key to blog success because if you aren't keeping track of how many people are viewing your page then you won't know if your blog is helping your business. Blogger allows you to see views and information in different time segments. You have the option of looking at now, day, week, month, or all time. Each of these options can be beneficial to helping you understand your audience. For example, if you did a whole week were you only blogged about one topic and that week performed the best compared to other weeks then you can better gauge what your audience is truly interested in. Another feature Blogger offers allows you to see what types of browsers or devices people are using to view your blog. It can tell you whether someone is using a mobile device or if they are using a certain Internet browser on their computer. This is beneficial to know because you may have to optimize your blog to make sure it appears appropriately and works correctly on both mobile devices and computers. 

After looking at my blogger statistics I noticed that I was getting views from the United States which makes sense because I have not yet promoted my blog on any type of social media site. Getting views is definitely exciting and makes you want to blog a lot more because you realize you are putting out content that someone else enjoys.  It is so clear how and why blogs can be an asset to a business and how you can almost form a community of people within your blog. When I looked at the operating systems that were being used to access my blog I found that Windows, Mac, iPhone, and Linux were the main sources, with Mac being the most used. Knowing this information, I was curious to see if Blogger looked the same on my iPhone as it did on my computer. I grabbed my phone and checked it out, and it did in fact look the exact same so now I know that my blog is accessible to people who are viewing it from mobile devices. It was also interesting to see how my blog differed from being on a computer to being on a phone, the setup is different but the theme stayed the same. 

This was the picture I saw when I was looking at my page views a few weeks ago.  It currently shows that I am only receiving views from the United States. 

Google Analytics Account

The second Chapter of the CASA Marketing book talks about setting up a Google Analytics Account and linking that to your blog. It is a fairly simple process but along the way you learn a few terms that are used with Google Analytics. These terms can get confusing so to be safe I made a Word document with the terms so that I can refer back to it and add on terms as I learn them. The first term I was unaware of was a tracking ID. A tracking ID is what allows Google to talk to and get information from the site you are trying to track.

The book explains how to connect your blogger account to Google Analytics so that you can start seeing the traffic that is coming to your blog. The set up is not too difficult, you just start out by adding your tracking ID into the settings on your blogger account. Once this has been done you should be able to go to Google Analytics and see whats happening on your blog. The book suggests sharing your blog link on social media in order to direct traffic to your site, that way you can actually get some information from your analytics account.

The main goal of a Google Analytics account is to track your goals or revenues and see how you are performing. You may want to track specific date ranges to see how your new advertisement or promotion has been working out. Say two months ago you put out a new promotion that led people to your website. You can actually go on Google Analytics and see how the traffic patterns have changed from before the promotion,  to during the promotion, and then after the promotion has run its course. This can save marketers a lot of time and money because they will be able to tell whether their marketing efforts are making a difference or not, and if they are not they can change their course of action.

This image shows what a tracking ID looks like and how you can place it into your Blogger account.

Picture Citation:

Kelsey, Todd. "Blogalytics." CASA Marketing: Intro to Google Analytics. Lexington: KY. RGB, 2015. 31. Print

The Importance of Web Analytics

In the CASA Marketing book the first chapter talks about how important Google Analytics is and how it is not a scary or really hard thing to understand. The book says that Web Analytics is a good skill to have because companies are always looking for people who will be able to better their websites and improve consumer traffic. One fear I had about Web Analytics was that it was going to require me to know a lot about numbers. I am not a numbers person so going into this class I feared that I would have a hard time understanding the numbers side of analytics.

I have always heard of Google Analytics but I was never quite sure what it was or how it worked. I had assumed that to use Google Analytics you had to be part of a company and you had to pay for the service. The CASA book mentions that there are other types of software that companies use such as Adobe Analytics and Open Source Analytics which are both costly programs,but great programs to know if you want to get a really good job.

Chapter one of the CASA book brings up social analytics which I was unfamiliar with. After reading the section on social analytics my impression is that it basically shows you how well your social media platforms are performing. It tells you how much traffic you are getting to your social media sites and from what places you are getting these viewers. I thinks this type of analytics is interesting because social media is so relevant in today's world that it just make sense to be able to see what kind of traffic you have coming to your sites.

I chose to put in a screen shot of my blog set up page because this was the first time I have ever made a blog so it was interesting to learn all about how blogs work and how one is set up.