Marketing Reflections: Google Analytics (Assigned School Work)

via Google website

            According to Oxford Dictionaries, the word analytics is both the, “systematic computational analysis of data or statistics,” as well as the, “information resulting from the systematic analysis of data or statistics.” In other words, analytics are the data and statistics that are gathered by a computational analysis as well as being the human analysis of the gathered information. To me, analytics are simply the gathering of specific information from the past to allow people in the present to be able to measure, analyze, and therefore predict the future based on trends and tendencies.

            My original goal in this course was, and is, to develop a greater understanding of digital marketing and its benefits. I’ve learned many things these past couple weeks, but none has piqued my interest more than analytics. Within the first week, we were required to add analytic capabilities to our blog sites using Google Analytics. We can now track valuable information from these sites about visitors, keywords used in search engines, and much more. We’ve also uploaded sitemaps to our blogs, using Google Webmaster, in order to index pages on our blog sites across search engines. Essentially, these tools assist websites with search engine optimization (SEO). According to Stokes (2008), SEO is the “practice of optimizing a website to achieve the highest possible ranking on the search engine results pages” (¶2). I look forward to learning more about these areas during the final two weeks of class.

            I have already implemented these tools within my own blog site and will continue to measure and analyze the data and statistics that I receive from it, in order to make educated decisions from the analytics. Once completed, I plan to apply these tools to my business website, as well. These tools are available for free and can be found online. If you have a website for business, then I highly recommend getting started with Google Analytics today.

Works Cited: 

“Analytics.” Oxford Dictionaries. Retrieved on September 14, 2014 from http://www.oxforddictionaries.com/us/definition/american_english/analytics

Stokes, R. (2013). eMarketing: The essential guide to marketing in a digital world (5^th ed.). (p. 231). eBook. Quirk Education.