Website Traffic Analysis
According to Google Analytics, over the semester I had 110 visits to my site with 83 unique visitors. I did a lot better than I ever expected having 76.1% being new visitors and 23.9% being returned visitors! Most of my traffic came from search traffic with an overwhelming 65.1%. My main source of this traffic came from Google. Direct traffic made up 31.2% and referral traffic only made up 3.7%. I am proud of my low bounce rate of 4.55% which is the percentage of visitors who left my site rather than continuing viewing other pages within my site. My Bringing Pinterest to Your Kitchen post I am proud to day brought the most page views being 135. Overall, I am pleased with what I have accomplished as I didn’t know much going into this course. The only thing I wish I would of done was use my social media more to increase referral traffic.
Webmaster Tools
There are many tools available to analyze my site on Google Webmaster Tools.One of the tools I enjoyed the most exploring was Search Queries, which shows keywords that were searched for where my site came up in the results along with the number of times clicked. Over the semester my site had 6 queries and was shown 320 times and click on about 10. According to my Webmaster tools, my best performing page was my Strategic Internet Marketing at JMU which appeared 150 times in search results and had an average position of 19. There are a lot of great tools one can use of off Webmaster Tools such as ones that track of outside links, internal links, and crawl errors, all of which are important factors in SEO. After reviewing some of the data from these tools I wish I would of provided more outbound links to my site by simply requesting some of my classmates to provide links from their page to my own. I wish I would of utilized these tools much more frequently to monitor my site’s success.
My Takeaways from MKTG 470
Over the course of this semester, I have learned many useful strategies and tools in MKTG 470 with Dr. Clarke that I will be able to use beyond this class. Strategic Internet Marketing has helped me develop a better understanding of how Internet Marketing works and how to use the resources available to my benefit. Most importantly, the class is very intensive and hands-on which really helps develop and put onto practice everything learned in the course. I have better learned how the internet is a very useful tool with endless avenues for marketers to take advantage of. Whether it is through search engine rankings, ads, social media or emails, internet marketing is prevalent and will continue to be an important aspect of the field in the future.
My Future with Internet Marketing
At the beginning of this course, I definitely did not expect to learn as much as I have. Beyond social media, I never thought Internet Marketing to consist of much more than just that. I never thought it had a lot to do with the built of a site or how to strategically use different tools and incorporating them within the site content. Learning about PPC and SEO really has opened my eyes to the world of Internet Marketing and has become an interest to my future career path. Everything learned in this course I have really enjoyed and hope to be able to further include my future towards this career path. I have recently accepted a sales associate position with Vocus which is a marketing software company that completely integrates Social, Search, Email & PR into one smart software solution. As I interviewed for this position and found out more about the company and software I realized all I learned in MKTG 470 is incorporated into what Vocus software entails. As I leave JMU and enter my venture with this company, I hope to be able to apply my knowledge of Internet Marketing I have gained to further create success in my life.
