I have been always fascinated by online marketing and the metrics used to measure the performance of a website. Unfortunately, I don’t have much experience in this yet and handled a project in online marketing data only once (a 6-months project in 2016) for a marketing agency whose clients were the likes of Audi, Volkswagen, and P&G. Because of this, I just decided to create my own project by measuring this website’s metrics and reporting what I do to improve those.

Now, I use this website so far only as a blog, where I can write articles sporadically mainly for my own use, that I’m trying things I want to experiment with and learn something from them, and so I can look back at the results and solutions that might come handy later. In other words, I write articles on this website only for me, actually. Because of this reason, I don’t actually care about the performance of my website. 10 visits a day is already a great achievement.

Since I want to experiment with strategies that can improve (or not) my website performance, though, I need to change its purpose. I need to make this website interesting for other people, too.

As a start, I will focus on improving these metrics (according to this Sumo article):

1. Website Traffic
2. Traffic Sources
3. Page Load Speed
4. Search Engine Impressions and Clicks
5. Goal Conversions
6. Top Pages

Those are the minimum that I actually have to (and want to) track. However, since we need other tools than Google Analytics for metrics #3 and #4 and I want to keep things even more simple, only metrics #1, 2, 5, and 6 will be measured here.

To make people visit my website, I have to have some things more to offer than blog articles. I may offer some tangible products later, but for now, in addition to creating great contents, I want to focus on offering services in IT consulting and development, mainly in data analytics and web programming. In this case, I will have good reasons to share my website in the social media.

Here are screenshots of this website’s Google Analytics for the whole August 2021 (don’t laugh at the number, please):

Website Traffic

Audience -> Overview:

Measures to improve: Users, Sessions, Pages / Session.

Traffic Sources

Acquisition -> Overview:

Sources to improve: Organic Search, Social.

Goal Conversions

Conversions -> Goals -> Overview:

Things to improve: obviously, I have to set up some goals here first.

Top Pages

Behavior -> Overview:

Things to improve: I think I just need to create more contents.

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It is very tempting to say such thing as “I want to increase all numbers by 10%”. Though it would be awesome, it is also great to know which strategies and processes are going to work. A small but steady increase of 1 or 2% in each and every month with the right plans is also a nice achievement (in order not to have a too-high expectations).

Using the tips from that Sumo article mentioned above, I will write a progress report on a monthly basis.