Google Analytics: Josalyn McMillan
Data Collection
To promote my blog article, I followed the assignment instructions and created two links to my introduction article. I then sent the respective links through email, to a group of grad students that would be willing to help me out, and I publicly posted the other on my personal LinkedIn. In my email, I just asked my fellow students for a favor and explained that this was for my class assignment, and on LinkedIn, I also explained why I was making my post and how anyone who sees the post could help.
My email content was as follows:
“Hello fellow grads :)
Could you do me a favor and click on this link for my social media class so I can collect the website visitor data?
Thank you so much,
Josalyn
In my LinkedIn post, I made sure to include my trackable link (https://pursue-persuade.squarespace.com/students/2025/meet-josalyn-mcmillan?utm_source=josalyn-mcmillan&utm_medium=linkedin&utm_campaign=assignment-2), a related picture, and hashtags (#socialmedia, #digitalmarketing, and #analytics) to allow my post to reach a wider audience.
This is a link to my post: https://www.linkedin.com/posts/josalyn-mcmillan-836ab8260_socialmedia-digitalmarketing-analytics-activity-7292250410851991552-_d9d?utm_source=share&utm_medium=member_desktop&rcm=ACoAAEA8LaoBzm8-jnof85Q_sqUBo4OUnwfkelE.
Data Analysis
Figure 1
As for the data Google Analytics collected from this experiment shown in Figure 1, I was surprised. Although LinkedIn had many more views and was shown to more people, the number of link clicks I received was very small. At the time I am writing this, my post has 121 impressions with 44 members reached.
Email is perhaps less efficient than LinkedIn, but it provided a much higher rate of engagement. Everyone I sent the link to via email, I know in person, so it was much easier to guilt them into helping me. When strangers see a LinkedIn post from someone they don’t know, they are much less inclined to click. I think I can apply the same concept to advertisements. I am more inclined to interact with an ad or promoted content if I am already familiar with the brand or product. The reinforcement of an ad really cements it in the brain of an audience. No less important is the eye-catching quality of the ad. If I saw an ad that was just a block of text, I would be less inclined to read it.
For page engagement time, the average for those that came from the email link was 12 seconds, whereas the average for LinkedIn was a whopping 1 second.
Figure 2
Figure 3
In comparing post performance for desktop vs mobile, my email link received more web traffic than mobile, whereas my LinkedIn received more mobile traffic. Engagement time overall was higher for email and mobile users.
Final Thoughts
Overall, my post engagement made up very little of our website’s total engagement. In the future, I think that I will focus promotions on platforms where I am more active and where my audience is made up of people that know me and are willing to take time out of their day to engage with my content.