John Heyssel - 10380323

What it was all about.

My blog's performance, tracked using Google analytics between 20/01 and 26/02.

I set up my blog on the 20th of January, and published my first entry on the 24th. I attempted to publish new entries weekly, but fell late a few times, including my most recent post on AI, which I wrote on the 27th of February (after the deadline) and have not included in my overall analysis due to late submission. 

(My apologies for submitting this a day late - I was out of the country for the first half of the week and didn't plan my assignment accordingly.)

My overall stats show that from 20/01 to 26/02, I had a total of 32 unique users across 105 sessions, a bounce rate of 52.38%, and an average session duration of 2 minutes and 27 seconds.

Users

The majority of my traffic came from direct referrals. After each new post, I shared a direct link to the entry in our class group chat. My classmates would click on the link and then leave their feedback.

Overview of user traffic sources between 20/01 & 26/02

"Users" were all classmates, and would access my pages primarily on their desktop devices, though a significant minority would visit on their mobiles. During the 20/01-26/02 period, my site was accessed from four different countries: Ireland, India, France and Bosnia & Herzegovina. Most visitors were located in Ireland, visits from India and B&H came from two students who had travelled to their homes to be with family over the course of the month. The visit from France was from me - I was in France from 21/02 until 26/02 and visited my page on my phone while travelling. Most of my traffic came between 10AM and 6PM, with a few outlying visits between 6PM and 10AM each day - this coincided with the times I'd post new articles and share the links in our group.

Overview of users by time, locations and devices used

Though largely unfamiliar with the intricacies of content planning, my site had a satisfactory bounce rate - with fewer than 60% of visitors leaving immediately after landing on my page. Each blog entry served as its own landing page and exit page, as I sent the direct link into our group for visitors to follow.

Visitor behaviour and page flow

The majority of users stayed only on the entry corresponding to the link they received, and the number of users who clicked through to other posts and pages on the site decreased significantly after each post. I tried to mitigate this by experimented with basic content optimisation and adding in-links between each of my posts so users could visit an older post directly after reading a current post. I also played around with external links to sources, and adding different forms of media to improve readability and user engagement. 

Overall, this assignment helped me hone my writing skills and allowed my to see in real-time the impact of (very basic) content optimisation strategy to improve visit duration and click-through rates. I'm excited to have begun a portfolio of online marketing content and plan to keep posting on this blog to track the progress of my thesis and sharpen my content devlopment and writing skills.