Undergraduate Blog / Defining Your Babson

Google Analytics

I love Google Analytics so much. We used it briefly in my Managing Information Technology class in the spring semester, and to be honest, I never thought I would use it again.
That is, until, we were having a slow day at the office and I, without any active projects to work on, asked if I could install it on our website. It works very well with Squarespace (our web host), and allows the analysis of all types of data, from bounce rates, to unique pageviews, to (pretty terrifyingly accurate) demographic data.
After the initial installation, Google Analytics does the large majority of the work, and I was able to showoff to my supervisors by making minor adjustments to our site and then actively measuring the effect that it has. Simply by removing our landing page (which had the highest exit rate of any of our pages) and replacing it directly with our “Artists” page (our most popular page), we’ve decreased our bounce rate by 10%, and increased our total time spent on site by 30 seconds.  Furthermore, after noticing that our “News” page received little to no actual views, I completely removed it, and instead replaced it with a much more interactive, “Engage” section, where I wrote blogs, histories of our bands, and links to exclusive content.  This page this radically and measurably better.

I’ve continued to track our Google Analytics data and used it to report on the age, gender, region, activity, and interests of our web visitors.  All in all it’s been a good time.  Thanks Google Analytics!