Blogging in Review

As my school years winds to the end, it is time to review how my personal branding project went. At first I was not into the whole blogging thing, but after jumping in and writing about something I love, I have seen the huge benefits of blogging. 

 Since this is a blog about market research, of course I had Google Analytics on my blog to see how effective my blog was. Below are some screen shots of my analytics. 

This is a shot that shows the general information- it shows I have had 167 visits to my website between January and April. Of those, 122 were unique visitors. The average time on the blog was 2 min and 33 seconds. I was really pleased to read this statistic because it showed that people were at the very least reading one post I had on my blog. 

In the image above it shows the bounce rate at 72.46%. For not having many pages for my viewers to go to, I think this is a great rate. 


While all these stats look fantastics, once I looked more in depth, I saw that there were lots of visitors who didn't spend anytime on the blog and left just as soon as they go there. This fact makes the first statistics seem like more people are going to my blog than actually are. Knowing this kept my head in the game and determined to try and make better posts that were more appealing to the viewers. Hopefully time will show that this tactic has worked. 


I have loved this experience and will continue to work on this blog as well as use twitter (@MegCril) to make connections with other market researchers to learn more about this evolving industry. I have learned about the newer tools that market researchers are using to gain data about consumers online. 


So stay posted for even more tools that are being used as well as my thoughts on different types of industry news!

The Challenges of Web Analytics

Location of visitors to megcril.blogspot.com

   Currently I have web analytics running on my blog. I figure the best way to fully understand a tool like this is to simply use it! As I look at all the information, some of it can be very deceiving. A difficult measurement is number of visitors. My favorite thing to look at is where all my visitors come from. There are a few from Russia, the United Kingdom, India, Canada and of course the US. However upon closer inspection of the reports, I notice that some visitors don't spend even a second on the blog. 

Av time on site for megcril.blogspot.com

    This is an important factor in understanding how well my website is doing. On the surface it looks like its a highly successful blog that people around the world are reading. However, upon closer inspection I can see that this is true for some of the countries, but it is not true for all. Which means I have some work to do on my blog to keep people on the site as well as I have to be critical of any of the information I receive via my analytics!
    This tid bit goes for market research in general. Don't just accept something at face value. Dig deeper and find out what they numbers are really telling you! More to come on this topic in future blog posts!