Week 15 Part A: What we learn from Google Analytics

    Google Analytics is a whole new tool to me and it took me a great deal of fiddling around to understand how to get started and use it. After some exploration, I truly can see how valuable of a resource it can be to grow and maintain a businesses reach.

    One of the most helpful tools is the engagement tool which tracks how users are engaging with the content you have posted. While reach is important, engagement is far more valuable as it shows many people have stopped to interact with the content whether it was to like, comment, zoom in, click links, etc. In a perfect world, your reach and engagement would remain steady or continue to grow (linearly or exponentially) but in reality engagement will fluctuate because of the posts impact on an audience. The engagement tool is able to show you which posts make the biggest and least impact on your connected pages. This is valuable as it can help steer content for posts to the most valuable (very engaged) by indicating what is working for them. On the other hand the posts that have less engagement also help guide a business or individual by showing them that this kind of content is not as important to their audience. Overall, this helps show a business where there efforts should be made in terms of content, posting time, etc. so that they are not using their resources to fall on dead ears (or eyes in this case).

    Another helpful tool from Google Analytics is the audience overview which monitors the numbers and behaviors of users visiting the website for the business. From this overview I think the most helpful tools are the sessions, average sessions, bounce rate, and number of sessions. Comparing the sessions, the number of time people visit, to the bounce rate, users that click off the site with no interaction, shows the innate interest in the business/product and the relevancy that the site has in terms of its SEO, ads, and links from posts. Having high numbers of sessions and a high bounce rate to me shows that the relevancy and interest of the site is quite low and that there needs to be improvement to better showcase what the business is about in search terms, content, and ads; the goal would definitely be to have high numbers of sessions and very little bounce rate. Sessions and average sessions are also great ways to indicate the effect the website has on users. Once someone has their foot in the door, how of the website and how much time they spend exploring the website can indicate the user's interest in the business. A high session with low average session to me shows that the user is looking to find specific information or quickly checking out the website but they might not be inherently interested in the business and the products. High average sessions with low to moderate sessions shows that a user is interested in specific things about the business i.e. a product, multiple products, or the business information.

    Ad reports is another useful tool that I may look into in the future. This is useful because it will indicate the clicks that an ad has received which shows how effective it has been in drawing in interested people and consumers. This tool best shows the effectiveness of ads or the lack of it and this can tell the business that their efforts spent have been worth what they put into it (money, time, content) or not. If this proves to be ineffective then a business should either re-evaluate their ads by changing how aggressive(frequency) they are, the content, or choose to steer away from this kind of tool for a bit. While having ads to put more eyes on a business, product, or service can really help a business grow it is important to know when to pull back or stop if this proves to be outside the means/worth for a business. As for now, I'm not working towards using paid advertisements or many ads for an art shop as I want to grow my audience more before delving into selling prints or other merchandise for my business.

    Google Analytics can be a very helpful tool that can help a business better gauge how effective their posts and marketing material is. If a business is able to funnel time and resources than they should use Google analytics to help grow and gain insight to improve their business and it's practices on social media.