Chris Barchard
Professor Fleury-Lawson
Homework 6
I chose the article, "Google Analytics Shows How Customers Travel Your Site", by David F. Carr on October 19, 2011. This article is about more improvements made to Google Analytics. In Google's equivalent, the new user flow
feature of Google Analytics, you're seeing how many visitors to an
online store complete the march to the shopping cart, or whatever the
equivalent is for your business in converting site visitors to
customers. Google has also improved on Minard by making the
visualization interactive, so you can drill down for more detail at any
point on the graphic. Google decided the upgrade was needed because site owners wanted to see how users moved around their website and if there were any problems at certain parts of the site. Google began enabling this capability across
Google Analytics accounts in the coming weeks with a
beta version of a realtime data analytics capability that lets you see
how many people are looking at your website at any given moment and what
they are looking at. User counts and the corresponding graphics update
in realtime as users come to the site and leave. This is a particularly
important capability for websites promoting themselves with social media
campaigns, who want to be able to see whether they are getting the
response they want.
Overall, I believe that the steps Google made in improving Google Analytics was a very important one. There are so many more possibilities with the use of Web 2.0, and Google is taking advantage of them. I also find that the improvements Google has made will make finding problems on other sites a lot easier and smoother. Now site owners can see if there is a spot on their site that lags or doesn't load for some reason just by looking over how their users move on the site. With Google's improvements come improvements from all other websites which will going on the web a lot faster and people will complain about less problems. We have already seen what Web 2.0 can bring to the table with the realtime updating on social network sites like Twitter and Facebook, but I think we are just scraping the surface on the possibilities that can be had.
Below is a video of
Susan Wojcicki, senior vice president of advertising at Google, at Web 2.0 Summit:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-MuWSPux6lo
Chris, I agree with the points that you make about the article that you chose to summarize. There are many possibilities to use the Web 2.0 software and Google is doing a great job in using it. What they are using that technology for is to make visuals better on certain websites and it will make it easier for sites to be navigated to. It is also making shopping carts online to buy products much easier to navigate as well also. They updated this because Google though it would make consumers lives easier in navigating the website which is true. I also agree with you that it makes finding problems on the websites much easier, all you need to do is hover over a part of the website and it is taken care of for you. This idea of just scrolling over a website to see if it doesn’t load is a just another way MIS is making things more effective.
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