MIS 587 - Blog 3

 Hello everyone,

This weeks lectures in MIS 587 covered lectures 9, Web Analytics, and lecture 10, Google Analytics.

Before this lecture, I was particularly interested in learning more about these tools prior to taking the MIS 587 course. I knew that they were powerful, and useful for organizations in helping understand their business, and after reviewing this week's course lectures, I found they thoroughly explained web analytics use cases and applications in business intelligence. While I currently do not operate a website myself, my family does operate a local donut shop in Tucson, Arizona. In the future, I wonder if I can create a website for my family's small business and apply the Google analytics software on the site to gauge customer traffic and see if it can positively affect their online business presence.

Lecture 9 Summary and Reflection:

According to the Web Analytics Association, web analytics is known as the measurement, collection, analysis, and reporting of internet data for the purposes of understanding and optimizing web usage. Web analytics provides information about the different forms of web traffic, visitor details and demographics, web metrics, KPIs, and other useful details that can be transformed into insightful reports. 

There are 5 W's of Web Analytics: What, Who, When, Where, and Why, which seek to answer different questions for businesses. Such questions can include "Who is visiting the website", What are their motivations for visiting the website, etc." Many questions businesses seek to answer stem from these areas. 

While web analytics are a powerful tool for businesses and organizations, I found the reports usefulness can vary depending on the organization type. In this week's assignment, I focused on an ecommerce site for the Google Merchandise Store, so my reports focused on revenue, marketing, and audience details. I found that other types of organizations, such a non-profit, may have other areas of focus that they would want to focus their web analytics analysis on.

Lecture 10 Summary and Reflection:

Lecture 10 focused on the Google Analytics tool on the University of Arizona's MIS website. Google analytics is a comprehensive web analytics package offered by Google that captures different aspects of a website's traffic and measures conversions and sales. The data is collected and given back to the website owners, allowing them to measure conversions, sales, site visits, task completion rates, and other details of web metrics, which in turn can help identify KPI's, understand strategic goals, and improve in opportunity areas. 

An example described in the course lecture explains that traffic from certain sources can be improved in order to attract new visitors. In this example, Dr. Ram states that perhaps it may be beneficial for the MIS program to advertise more on social media and gain more visitors through referral traffic. 

After using the Google analytics tool firsthand, it's apparent how this tool is extremely useful for businesses to understand their online presence and determine if they are meeting their organizational goals. From my research into web and google analytics, there were many useful articles and I found the Google analytics beginner training courses to be quite a useful resource. 

Overall, I found these week's lecture on Web analytics to be the most interesting concepts in business intelligence thus far, and I hope to progress my knowledge in web analytics in the future. If I end up creating a website for my family's small business, I know that Google analytics is a tool I should enable to understand my websites metrics and demographic details. 


Comments

  1. AnonymousFebruary 15, 2022 at 8:58 PM

    Hi Matthew,

    I enjoyed reading your blog. Can I ask which donut shop your family operates? I agree, I think that if you used Google Analytics for your families shop you could make a lot of valuable predictions. Looking at trends for sales increase to know when to order extra ingredients and profits would be very useful. It is an amazing tool that I unfortunately only got about a week into learning it but now that I have some exposure to it, I will definitely be using it for work projects or other class assignments in the future.

    ReplyDelete
  2. AnonymousFebruary 15, 2022 at 9:33 PM

    Hi, Matthew,

    I think that a donut shop would make for a very interesting website design experience, as well a great opportunity for data analysis opportunities. You could analyze trends such as popular donut flavors and combinations and even do some basket analysis to spot some potential deals you could offer. One of the best ways to learn is to just go out and do it, and this would be a great opportunity to learn the joys of web development. I hope your pursue this endeavor and I wish you the best of luck. Great post!

    - Tyler

    ReplyDelete
  3. AnonymousFebruary 17, 2022 at 7:37 PM

    Hey Matthew,

    I think it'd be super cool to apply google analytics to a website that you designed yourself! It'd be interesting if you would be able to spot any trends that might be able to grow your parents business even more. I definitely love a few local donut shops here in Tucson so maybe I'm one of your parent's customers. Good luck with everything!

    Daniel

    ReplyDelete
  4. Peter KimFebruary 20, 2022 at 10:53 AM

    Hi Matthew,

    I think it'd be super cool to apply google analytics to your family's donut shop! I always find the idea of applying what we learned to improve our lives a great idea.

    The department I work for has a Google Analytics property set up for our main page, but I would like to see if we can get one set up for our career site as well. It would be great to gain a better understanding of the 5 W's of web analytics and see who is applying to what kind of jobs from where. It would help us focus our outreach efforts to attract a diverse pool of candidates.

    I also found the beginner course in the Google Analytics Academy to be extremely helpful. I might even try to take the intermediate course at some point in the future. Best of luck to you in the rest of this course!

    ReplyDelete

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