First of all, it all seemed very confusing as I have NEVER used Google Analytics (GA) before!
However reading through a couple of Econsultancys articles on Google Analytics, I now feel a lot more informed and can see how useful it can be to an organisation for a range of reasons.
The first article I looked at, as a beginner of GA, was titled 'How to use Google Analytics advanced segments a guide for beginners.'
It was a great article which explained what advanced segments were and what range of segments there were. It also went on to explain why they should be used. This opened my eyes to see what uses there were and then how important it can be to an organisation on what sort of visitors were looking at the page in terms of what device they were using, where they lived, the time of day and many other methods of measuring and informing the website owner a little bit more about their visitors. It went on to include information on how to create a customer advanced segment which you can personally choose what specific segments you choose to focus on.
Once I had read this I also found an article, on Econsultancy again, which was '10 useful customer Google Analytics reports and dashboards for publishers.' This was also very interesting to see what custom made Dashboards people have already made which can be applied to my own GA account by downloading them.
There were a variety of different dashboards which I found interesting and useful.
The first one I found interesting was about when people are viewing your content. This dashboard basically looked at what time of the day people were looking at your webpage and it also detailed what days were most popular. This would be a great way of planning what day to post your blog and at what time. This could increase the amount of visitor to your page, increasing the awareness of the blog/page.
The second dashboard I found to be interesting was the referring sites dashboard. This shows which site referred viewers to your page, and also how many. This can help target specific pages, for example if it was Twitter, to tweet your page more often as a lot of people were referred to your page.
The third, and final dashboard I found most interesting was Social Media Dashboard which basically detailed no. of people that read an article, the revenue generated by visitors clicking on your site and the 'Per Visit Value' and the most socially shared content.
As a beginner, I found both of these articles EXTREMELY useful and would recommend any new blogger or page owner to read some of the articles on the Econsultancy site. I now feel I can use GA to my advantage tracking visitors on this blog and going from there.
Thursday, 31 October 2013
Thursday, 17 October 2013
BIG DATA: Is a picture really worth 1000 words!?
So the guys at Google, MIT and Harvard have been thinking about the phrase 'Is a picture worth 1000 words" and well, two guys, Jean-Baptiste Michel and Erez Lieberman Aiden, have the outcome that it is not worth 1000 words... It is worth 500 BILLION words!!
Google is currently in the process of digitizing books and publishing them online. So far they have digitized 15 million books. I thought this was a lot, until they uncovered that 15 million was only 12%!! So they've got a fair way to go.
What this digitization has enabled is that you can now analyse what words people have written in their books from centuries ago and compare that to what people have written in their books recently. This allows trends to be picked out to see what everyone is writing about. The way of analysing this is by the use of Ngrams - a new way of picking out and underlining key trends of words! A key tool i'm sure if you're looking to do that?
A phrase called culturomic came up in this video, it is the application of massive scale data collection and analysis of the study of human culture. Apparently everyone can do this, but to me, hearing it for the first time.. What does this mean!?
The link for this video is below.. Have a click and have a look.
http://www.ted.com/playlists/56/making_sense_of_too_much_data.html - Look for the second video in the playlist "Jean-Baptiste Michel + Erez Lieberman Aiden: What we learned from 5 million books"
Google is currently in the process of digitizing books and publishing them online. So far they have digitized 15 million books. I thought this was a lot, until they uncovered that 15 million was only 12%!! So they've got a fair way to go.
What this digitization has enabled is that you can now analyse what words people have written in their books from centuries ago and compare that to what people have written in their books recently. This allows trends to be picked out to see what everyone is writing about. The way of analysing this is by the use of Ngrams - a new way of picking out and underlining key trends of words! A key tool i'm sure if you're looking to do that?
A phrase called culturomic came up in this video, it is the application of massive scale data collection and analysis of the study of human culture. Apparently everyone can do this, but to me, hearing it for the first time.. What does this mean!?
The link for this video is below.. Have a click and have a look.
http://www.ted.com/playlists/56/making_sense_of_too_much_data.html - Look for the second video in the playlist "Jean-Baptiste Michel + Erez Lieberman Aiden: What we learned from 5 million books"
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