An Analysis of the Blog Analytics

It has arrived, the last blog entry :) the Google Analytics Report! You'll see that luckily there's enough data to start gaining the first insights and influencing the first business decisions and steps. Here we go: 

- Audience

Well, it seems like my blog wasn't popular enough.. but hey, it's international! My key learnings from this report is that I have to combine an Outbound Awareness strategy/campaign to gain more traffic and create richer content for people to stay and browse for longer times. For example, providing industry tips and articles, and having my page in Spanish (main target) and English.

- Acquisition

This is my favorite report (because of the results I see). You can appreciate how the biggest source of traffic is Referral - being DBS the main channel. In the future, I aim to revert this percentage for my business model and make it the lower one, as I only expect referred visits from industry news and partners or affiliate mkt. In terms of Social,13 is a number that I find particularly curious as I haven't posted the blog link into social media, but I did share a couple of posts through LinkedIn messaging tool, so I assume it comes from there.This is one of the main sources to work with at the beginning so I will be creating Socia Media content with a weekly calendar to leverage the Social visits and increase that percentage, that I expect to lead the chart. Direct traffic reflects how people knows your brand and searches directly, I have direct visits in my blog coming from friends that I asked to check, but in the future I want more people to search directly from word of mouth and recommendations. Another important thing to note is that in the real business, I expect to make this chart grow in categories such as Email: starting outbound quarterly campaigns with sendbloom or mailchimp, and Paid Search: to position my brand through a good SEO and SEM strategy to increase that number.

The number of active users per months shows that the 13th of May I significantly gained more users than usual, so I will apply similar strategy from that entry that week as it seemed to have effect! The content was fresh and anecdotic so I'll apply these principles in the future. 

- Behavior

I chose the weekly report here as we worked in weeks period and most of my traffic comes from other students visiting weekly. I'm happy with the page visits and average time on page, these are metrics that I'm going to use as Monthly KPI's in my business. As per the bounce rate, I checked a couple of blogs and, according to the Gorocketfuel*, 49% is the average and 40% is an excellent metric, so I'm supper happy and will work towards maintaining this in the future. Time on page is also good, as we had blog entries of 200 words and were easy to read, but for my own strategy I'll take 4 mins minimum as a good metric because of the quantity of text and interactions I expect the visitor to make.

- Conversions

I had 25 goal completions, which is a metric that is good for my blog purpose but I'd like to increase in a real website. Taking in consideration that during the first months my focus will be in Social media and word-of mouth, and that i want my content and page to be really engaging, I expect minimum 50 goal completions per month.As here we were writing a blog with no commercial purpose, my only conversion goal was for people to stay longer than 2 minutes. It does't have a $ value but in the future, for my website,  I will set up a goal for time (minimum 4 minutes) and a form filling goal for traffic to ask for "More information". Here if I ever manage an e-commerce, my goal would be direct $ of traffic converted to sales.

As an overall conclusion, I can proudly say that I've created a hub for people to read interesting content and I've completed my main goal 25 times. My public is referred from DBS and international, which are channels that I'm going to put my first focus on changing, by working on the outbound strategies and content in a consistent way. This data can be overwhelming if you have a huge amount of visits and sources but it's a matter of selecting the most important ones for your business and check them regularly, in order to being constantly taking actions to improve the overall strategy.

* https://www.gorocketfuel.com/the-rocket-blog/whats-the-average-bounce-rate-in-google-analytics/#:~:text=As%20a%20rule%20of%20thumb,%2C%20news%2C%20events%2C%20etc.