Laura Fletcher IMC 642

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...