As you've seen for the last 2-3 weeks or so, this blog has been an important part of who we are as a company. Not only is it a great journal for us, but it's also a way for us to give you an inside look into us and who we are as people.
Because our blog is our only connection to 99% of you, it's a necessity that we understand how you're interacting with our site on a day to day basis. We can talk to you through our blog posts, but you can't talk back to us about your reading habits unless you were to send us an e-mail every single time you check out the site (and how inconvenient would that be).
To give us a hand in gaining a better look at what our audience thinks of our blog posts, we use Google Analytics with the site to learn more information on specific parts of the site with regards to what was or was not popular.
The tool is extremely easy to use. All you need to do is a webmaster is include a bit of code into your site as directed by Google. After that, the site will begin tracking your visitors and their habits on the site. As you can see above, we had a peak in traffic after appearing on AppCraver which worked its way back down to normal until our steady increase last week or so.
You can gain an in-depth look as to what parts of the world your visitors are coming from. In CollegeKidApp so far, we've seen a lot of local traffic in Northwest Indiana as well as relatively strong traffic in California and New York. It's important to know your traffic, that way you can target your posts to your potential audience. If I know that most of our readers are within driving distance, I could set up a CollegeKidApp meet up or offer services in the area (such as we did with our consultation service) because I know local people are keeping up with the site.
Keeping up with traffic sources is another important tool in Google Analytics. As you can see, social networking sites such as Twitter and Facebook help bring us a lot of people to the site. Not only do I know which sites the traffic is coming from, but what parts of those sites as well. For example, I know that more people visit this site through our CollegeKidApp Twitter account as opposed to my own personal account. Again, another key feature that helps me learn where our audience is coming from.
If you've ever done web design, you know or you've been taught that search engine traffic is HUGE. Each day, billions of searches are preformed on Google, Yahoo!, AOL, etc. If people are going to be searching for topics similar to what you provide on your site, why wouldn't you want those searches to direct potential viewers to your own webpage? Because this traffic is so lucrative, we've seen a whole career develop out of it with SEOs (search engine optimizers). We don't have enough money to hire an expert to help us with this, but we can see through Google Analytics what search terms are bringing users to our site. As you can see, Blender shows up pretty high in part to some posts which Jeff wrote about making our intro video through the program. Since people are coming here for that content, maybe we should work on writing more blog posts about it? Just one thought that can come out of using Google Analytics.
Now that I know where our traffic is coming from, what parts of our site are viewers checking out? The first entry there is our homepage, which makes sense because we're a blog. After that, you can see that our Metroid Marathon is an interesting subject to many people who check out the site. More information about our team, the site, and our projects follow up to round out the top 5 here as well. Again, these pages help me see what people are interested in so that we can write more of this content. We're not making money off ad revenue with this site, but if we were, this information would help us make posts which best gain page views and thus maximize ad revenue.I hope you enjoyed this little look into Google Analytics. The content I covered is just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to Google's free website analyzation tool. Hopefully I can write up a post in a couple weeks detailing some of the more complex features available through the service. If you're a webmaster and you don't have this or something like it running on your site, I highly suggest that you check it out. Have any questions about Google Analytics? Send me an e-mail to Cameron@CollegeKidApp.com and I'll get back to you as soon as possible.
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