Google Analytics: Assessment of Blog Performance.

In this final blog, the performance of all 11 blogposts will be assessed by using Google Analytics from 22^nd March to 19^th June. As there isn’t a large amount of traffic available I’ll focus on where people are coming from, what they are doing when they are on the site, what happens with re-engagement and patterns that come from this.

Audience Location

The blog was visited by users from 3 countries Ireland, Netherlands and Poland. As expected most of the users and visits came from Ireland. But between Poland and Netherlands, Poland has a higher engagement in both duration and pages per session and lower bounce rate. If the blogs were to continue I would monitor the countries engagement and their needs merited to this.

Having seen that 99% of users use English as their language setting, I wouldn't look at translating the content of the blog to any other languages yet. The table also shows that all users were on a desktop platform and although mobile optimistaion is important for all sites at the moment the data doesn’t demonstrate the need for this.

Audience User report- What are users doing on the site?

You can see the highest average sessions per user also has the highest bounce rate. When I drilled into the most engaged users you can see they were spending a lot of time reading the content; in this case for the top three users in total, spent over 2 and half hours engaged, clicking through to blogs and reading content. You can also see that there were repeat visits with no engagement which is brining the bounce rate higher and eventually in some cases the user didn’t come back and interact with any posts.

The Cohort Analysis report allows me to delve in deeper as to what was happening for the users when they were engaged. In the report below you can see in the first two weeks, 5 users came back to view blog content, you then see a gap in returned engagement.

Looking at both user data reports in google analytics I created the below graphs to illustrate what's happening with engagement rates. 

The red line represents repeat engagement grouped by the week. You can see the attrition rate correlates to no blogs published. Drawing from the above reports I can see I was losing the retention of repeat users and although they came back to see new content when they weren’t getting what they wanted, they then never came back.

You can see these changes in May (week 8) in the below graph, I published content consecutively 3 times in 3 weeks the blog began to see repeat engagement, however, this still did not bring back previous users. 

This goes to show how important it is to be consistent in posting blogs. 

Users Flow

There are two main sources of traffic driven to the blog one from referral which was DSB site and the second blogspot.com, I’ve focused my analysis on the blogspot user flow. The user flow shows good click-through engagement, you can see that most users flowed seamlessly from one blog to another. Most users clicked through from one post to another giving it a maximum of 12 interactions for 1 user. 

Although the homepage had a drop off rate of 15 users it showed that people were returning to the same blog, this could be through predictive or past searches saved on google. Through the site, new blogs can only be seen when you scroll to the bottom of an existing blog if the blog was designed with a sticky navigation tool, users could easily navigate to new content through here.

In conclusion, I would set four objectives going forward to focus on with 2 immediate actionable tasks. Using the current data as benchmarks I would come back in 2 months and run the same reports to measure the success of the objectives and actions taken. 

Objectives	Tasks
Increase traffic to the website	-        share through social media platforms -        get other people to mention my blog
Decrease bounce rate	-        ask questions to users so they leave a comment -        add a short video
Retain repeat engagers	-        blog consistently -        ask for an email address users are notified when a new blog is published
Improve the user experience on-site	-        develop a top bar navigation tool that brings you back to all the posts. -         Show newer posts first.