Characterize your website.

When I learned about each subject my professors always lectured on the importance of tracking engagement to determine the success of any campaign, ad, blog, website, etc. It is crucial to analyze the characteristic patterns to oversee the actions taken with content. 

There are many types of metrics to record the effectiveness of any media content whether it be a blog, social media post, website, or advertisement. The metric I chose to highlight for this blog post is Visit Characterization in websites. Visit Characterization is commonly used in web analytics to review the amount of traffic visitors move on and off a website. Components that make up the characterizations of the visits to a website include entry/landing pages, the duration of the visit on the website, and the click through rates & ratios. 

Entry and landing pages are the first visuals of the website connecting with a visitor. Entry pages are the starting pages to the website, usually it has different tabs with other URLs for visitors to be directed through the site. According to Click Insight, “Each visit contains at least one ‘page,’ the total number of entry pages equals the total number of visits for any given time frame.” The number of visitors to the entry page tracks to determine the impact of the website to the audience.

The landing page however, acts as the main page that comes in the search after researching keywords. I work for the LaunchLab at WVU. If you google “WVU LaunchLab” on Google it will come up with the main homepage. A landing page example is if you google LaunchLab WVU opportunities” it will take you to the upcoming events tab. Visitors have the option of using the entry page to find what they're looking for, but the landing page can be easier when using a search engine to be directed accordingly. 

Although the action of a visitor getting to the website is important, the duration of a visitor on a website can determine the likeliness of the stay. “When there is only one piece of activity in a session, no visit duration is typically reported.” (Click Insight 2017) Is your website easy to navigate? Or do visitors have a difficult time directing through the information they are looking for? These are the questions that can be answered through the research of web metrics regarding the duration. 

The final components of the visit characterization are click-throughs rates and ratios. The definition from the IMC 642 Lesson 1 states, “ the number of times a link was clicked by a visitor. The rates are the number of click-throughs for a specific link divided by the number of times that link was viewed.” In my professional opinion, I believe that click - throughs are one of the most effective actions a visitor can take when visiting a website. The actions they take to the website shows they found something useful through the site. For example, if 1000 visitors come to a website, but only 60 people click on the “About Us” tab there is something that needs to be improved. It is important for businesses to base decisions on Web analytics because they can determine success of all outreach to best improve relationships with their audience.

- NA

Hay, L. (2017, February 7). Why you should be using analytics to inform your UX Work. Retrieved from: https://www.clickinsight.ca/res/web-analytics-definitions-3

Tietbohl, M. (2020). Lesson 1. Retrieved October 14, 2020, from https://ecampus.wvu.edu/webapps/blackboard/execute/displayLearningUnit?course_id=150868_1&content_id=_7384399_1&frameset/Wrapped=true