Lecture 5: Website Analysis Process

Ten years ago, websites are only for web presents. Now, we not only want people to visit our websites but want conversion, that is, people visit our website and do what we want. To improve the website, we should analyze the website and see what we can do. Before starting to analyze visit traffic, there are some critical steps we need to proceed.

First of all, thoroughly understand the website in both content and structure. Knowing the content helps us to familiarize with organization's business and core competences, and what message it wants to convey. From the structure of website, we can see how an organization navigate visitors within website and generate improvements that make website more friendly and goal oriented.

Lecture 4: Analysis Presentation of Eller MIS department website

Presentations are focused on recommendations to the alumni and partnership sections of the Eller MIS website to improve each section. Most teams merely introduced the general findings in the Google Analytics and made recommendations without considering the targeted audiences and the goal of the website. As Dr. Ram and Ms. Anji Seigel mentioned, we should identify the goal and the targeted audiences before we start our analysis and making recommendations. Otherwise, we actually don't know what we are working on, since recommendations should be tied to objectives.

Lecture 3: Google Analytics

Before access into Google Analytics account, we are better to know the goal that we want to achieve and what the KPI for the goal is. When you first time log into the Google Analytics, setup a long period time slot to overview the fluctuation of traffic over time. We should be curious about what reasons or events caused the fluctuation, since the factors made a peak in previous period can an important element of our future element. Several critical terminologies of Google Analytics as followings were introduced during the lecture, helping web/data analyst to interpret visitor's behavior.