Prof T's SEO and Analytics Blog

Hello Class! I hope you enjoy this session.  This class population is smaller in size than I have ever had, and it may provide the opportunity to open things up a bit. We can explore if we want to, and I hope we will do that. Something you can help me with…. As you know, WVU is switching to links for the readings. There are still a few (mainly in Weeks 1 and 3) that I still want to use in this session. If you cannot see them, I will post them on the board. Please let me know. Not only will I test concepts here at times, but I will also create links for blog posts from the class in my blog roll so that you can see the impact that has on your traffic and rankings. I have three blogs, all for different purposes, so I tend to post to this one when we are all working our blogs here in class. Upon occasion, I will post things here that are pertinent to the class, but I generally will also post those same thoughts elsewhere. Please visit here at least once a week....

We often find ourselves in a bind today related to having enough, or actually, the correct information about our customers. We want to be highly personal, and we do not want to step over the line but doing that requires a great deal of knowledge. Today, collecting data and information on our visitors to our sites, to our apps and to our social media platforms is fairly easy. There are also numerous third party entities that are collecting data. But solid knowledge is not something we have full access to right from the beginning. It needs to develop and unfold over time. Personalization – true personalization – often requires ongoing interactions and history. We may get some idea early on about the visitor and their profile, but building a profile over time that is using our data, and not someone else’s data, is the best method of achieving true personalization. Mobile has been tremendously helpful in building customer profiles, but it has also made the customer more unp...

Hello! I hope you enjoy this class.  Not only will I test concepts here, but I will also create links for blog posts from the class so that you can see the impact that has on your traffic and rankings. As you can see, I have not posted to this blog for a little while. I have three blogs, all for different purposes, so I tend to post to this one when we are all working our blogs here in class. Upon occasion, I will post things here that are pertinent to the class, but I generally will also post those same thoughts elsewhere. Please visit here at least once a week. I do like to see that I have visitors. And leave a comment from time to time, not only here but on each other’s blogs as well. Prof. T

Here is an article from Adobe Analytics that provides some insight into the value of Web Analytics. Granted, Adobe has a stake in this game, but their thoughts here (in this grief article) are worth reading. I think one insight here that is key is that Web Analytics can often lead to further lines of inquiry. This makes sense, because web analytics, by itself, cannot tell the whole story. I would appreciate your thoughts: http://www.adobe.com/experience-cloud/articles/web-analytics.html (Graphic owned by Bruce Clay, Inc. and found at: https://www.bruceclay.com/analytics/google-analytics.htm )

Just a brief note to get us started on our web analytics journey. We will soon see that there are many types of analytics tools available, and most only measure a small art of the experience (web, social media, mobile, in store, etc.). There are programs that can pull all of these individual tools together today. Here is an article written by Kiera Abbamonte (2017) that discusses the role of web analytics and the overall discipline of marketing analytics to our marketing practices today. Her points are valid; namely that data can help to determine if you are on track and even may point you to what track you are on. Data can support decisions (or refute decisions) we have already made, but it provide insights that may support the need for further discussions with our target audience. This is where the user experience tools, and the bigger picture customer experience tools come into play. (For a brief discussion of the difference between the two, I wrote a summary that is posted ...

This is my first post on the new blog...Prof T's SEO and Analytics Blog. I did this so that I could test the new features of Blogger and also some of the newer aspects of Google Analytics that are hard to test when you have the same old properties for a while :) I hope you enjoy this class. Not only will I test concepts here, but I will also create links for blog posts from the class so that you can see the impact that has on your traffic and rankings.