Laura Fletcher IMC 642

If I may toot my own horn, I am a content queen. I can write well, manage a marketing communications team, and create a solid strategic plan. Unfortunately, this expertise can make me want to jump into the deep end of new integrated marketing and communications topics…without a life vest. Now that I’m soaking wet from a course on website analytics and SEO, I realize that Semrush can be a great tool to guide a SEO newbie—even an experienced one, ahem—who wants to learn everything but needs a step-by-step guide to do the research, set benchmarks, and draw conclusions.  Figure 1: Edited version of the "clean all the things" meme (Brosh, 2010).   I was a hare, and it was time to be a patient tortoise. They’re better swimmers anyway. As a WVU Reed College student I’m given temporary access to the powerful (and ordinarily expensive) search engine marketing tool Semrush, so I began following their training as I tried out various features. Semrush Academy, as it bills itself, provi...

Photo of Lagusta Yearwod by Matt Petricone (Schaerlaeckens, 2016).    For a marketing communications professional, social media can make you feel like a kid in a candy shop. So many platforms, and within them so many features and trends to use for content, and on the backend so many tools to integrate with your website and spin out data for analytics. However, overindulgence in social media is a real problem, and though you may not get a stomachache from overeating bon-bons, you can overspend in both time and budget.  When marketing for a business, starting off by understanding the business’s goals, its competition (and general industry trends), and the merits of each social media platform, a marketer can select a small handful of platforms on which to focus their energy and their dollar. To stay with the candy shop theme, the example business in this post is Lagusta’s Luscious , a vegan chocolatier that has a few retail shops in New York and does vigorous online shipping...

Google Analytics has a lot going for it as a web analytics tool. Since my work experience has been working with tight-budget nonprofits, I appreciate that the basic GA package is free to use. In my work in higher education, I’ve worked for units within a large university that don’t manage systemwide admissions or donations (to name two big-picture organizational goals). This often means leaner staffing and smaller marketing communications budgets; however, these units also have business goals and specific audiences to reach to achieve them. Keeping in mind the perspective of one college within a university, I propose keeping GA and using a complementary tool to share more user experience insights than GA can provide alone: Hotjar .  Google Analytics: What it can and can’t do on its own First, let’s go over the powerful advantages of using GA. As mentioned above, GA has a free version that can do almost everything a small- to medium-size business needs to view key website metrics, w...

After working in marketing communications content for so many years, I am admittedly having trouble deprogramming myself from thinking of the “landing page” as another way of saying homepage or at least the main page of a site subsection. As Mark Tietbohl said, this can also refer to different things in lead generation and PPC advertising (2022).  In web analytics, a landing page is the page where a specific session began—where a user came in first, no matter where they go next. It’s in the category of visit characterization and refers to what digital door any user used. In Google Analytics, this is a dimension as opposed to a metric, so it ends up in a row, not a column, as Avinash Kaushik (2010) explained. This is a specific spot on your site, so you then you drill down into to see how many visits (or sessions) it received, the average time a user spent on the page, bounce rate, conversion rate, and much more (see fig. 1).  Figure 1: A Yahoo! Web Analytics report shows page ...

The term “unique visitor,” in web metrics jargon, refers to an individual person who visits a website within a specified time period. It’s also referred to as a user. This counts the visitor once regardless of whether they come to your site more than once within that timeframe. Since I’m studying web metrics through Google Analytics, at least for now, this is how GA defines unique visitors, using the term users: “Google uses a unique identifier (usually based on a first-party cookie) to keep track of users and identify returning visitors vs. unique visitors over a specific time period” (Mastrianna, 2021). If a visitor comes back—another “session,” in the lingo—they still only count as one. I imagine them as party-goers with a stamp on their hand so they can leave and come back into the club. Nice to imagine your website as a hot spot, right? The point of unique visitors: Why count the hand stamps? Understanding the definition of unique visitor is all well and good, but as with any metr...