My goal is to be working as a software developer before the year 2016. My website will help me achieve this goal by showing local tech folk my knowledge, skills and achievements. All updates to this project can be found on the main project page.

Measuring Online Goals is So Easy, It’s Hard

Measuring your goals for a website is so easy it’s hard. What do I mean by that? The internet is full of tools to measure and report metrics! You can measure any and every metric possible, but until you know what it is you want to measure, all these tools will only provide useless fluff.

I only looked into one analytics tool, Google Analytics. Truthfully, It does about 50 times more than I could ever possibly want to do, but it’s free and I’m already immersed in the Google world. Plus I was impressed with the really cool Google Analytics Academy that I got to use as an online, self-paced guide to learn about analytics.

Reviewing My Goals

I need to make sure I’m measuring information from my website that relates to my goals. Essentially I narrowed down my main goal into 3 main parts. I want to attract people who are involved in the local technology industry, because those are the people I want to work for and work with. I want to show off my work to the people who visit my site. And since I am not planning to complete my goal for another 2 years, I want to encourage visitors to return and see more projects.

My Measurement Plan

At the recommendation of the Google Analytics Academy, I decided to use Avinash Kaushik’s measurement planning model to measure my website’s success. Since my website is essentially a branding website, I decided to go with the goals that closely resemble a branding website such as driving awareness, engagement and loyalty. I will attract users, show off my work and encourage loyalty.

I will attract visitors using social media posts. I will measure my success by using the Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) of the amount of visitors and the bounce rate for my landing pages. My target goals are 100 visits per month and a maximum bounce rate for my Colorado Tech Weekly (CTW) posts of 70%.

I will show off my work with blog posts and project updates. I will measure my success by using bounce rate as a KPI. My target goal for my non-CTW landing pages is 60% bounce rate. If you are interested in my blog posts and project updates, I assume you will be more engaged than the average CTW visitor.

I want to encourage returning visitors. I haven’t quite figured out how to do that yet, but I want to measure my success by comparing new vs returning users and by my social media interactions. My target goal is to have 33% of my users to be returning users. This will require some work.

Next up, I will focus on personas. It’s time to me to find out who my audience is so that I can adapt my content accordingly.