Blog entry 3b: How has Google analytics been used – case study of Nissan

Google Analytics

Google Analytics (GA), a user-friendly application, is a free service offered by Google that generates detailed statistics about the visits to a website. This tracking application, external to the website, records traffic by inserting a small piece of HTML code in every page of the website GA tells the web owner information about visitor and traffic volumes, top referrers, time on site and depth on site to conversion rates, pay stickiness, visitor latency, frequency, revenue and geographic distribution, to name a few (Plaza 2009).

 How it has been used 

Moreover, the web analytics such as GA can also help to enable agile, data-driven decision making across the organisations (Google Inc. 2012). For example, GA can help website operators to determine whether visitors from social media sites such as Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn have positive impact on your websites’ reach and conversions; which visitor acquisition channels work best and to what extent these should be increased or decreased; whether site search is worth the investment and whether overseas visitors would be better served with more localised content (Clifton 2012).

Case Study of Nissan

Nissan, a Japanese automotive company with worldwide presence, own a network of websites across the world that helps consumers decide which Nissan vehicle they’d like to purchase. They wanted to access much greater detail such as user’s preferences according car type, model, and colour and therefore prompted visitors requesting brochure or test drive to complete a form about their product preferences. By analysing resulting reports, Nissan can understand which vehicles are in demand and can make decisions tailored for each local market.

For Nissan, the advantage of using Google Analytics (GA) have been significant.Firstly, to facilitate the dissemination of information, Nissan takes advantage of GA’s flexible profile setting and custom reporting. The customer reports allow Nissan to easily perceive complex information in one view, dramatically reduce the time to summarise multiple reports, document the findings and share this within the organisation. Secondly, GA’s partner Ayudante provided expertise and guidance in optimizing these features. As a result Nisan has been decentralize access to their different market operations. Finally, GA give Nissan access to timely information, which enables more accurate decision making that has real effect on the company’s bottom line (Google Inc. 2013).

REFERENCES

Clifton, B., 2012,  Advanced web metrics with Google Analytics, John Wiley & Sons.

Google Inc., 2012, , Travelocity Case Study, viewed at 15 September 2014, from http://www.google.com.au/analytics/customers/pdfs/travelocity.pdf

Google Inc., 2013, Nissan Case Study, viewed at 15 September 2014, from http://www.google.com.au/analytics/customers/pdfs/nissan.pdf

Plaza, B. 2009, Using Google Analytics for measuring in-links effectiveness. Faculty of Economics / University of the Basque Country & Art4pax Foundation, 23 December.

Blog task 3a: Compare 3 Social networks – Pinterest, Instagram and Tumblr

 You are what you share.
― C.W. Leadbeater, We Think: The Power Of Mass Creativity

While all conventional social media services are mostly text-intensive, some of them, particularly Pinterest, Instagram, and Tumblr, have gone beyond text, and have introduced images as their building blocks. Consequently, these sites have gained immense popularity in the recent years, indicating successful entrance of image-based social networking sites (Mittal et al. 2013). Yet, according to social media marketing radar (Smart Insights 2012), Pinterest, Instagram and Tumblr are categorised into different types of social media sites, namely social bookmarking, social streaming and social publishing.

 Pinterest

As an image-based social bookmarking media, Pinterest has gained a lot of attention from businesses that are in highly visual niches including fashion, food, photography and other artistic niches. Within 3 years since it was established in 2010, Pinterest has attained 48.7 million unique users. It describes itself as a visual discovery tool to collect ideas for projects and interests. Users can personalise their experience with Pinterest by visually bookmarking (called ‘pinning items’), sharing collections boards (called ‘creating boards’), and interacting with other members.

Instagram

Instagram is an online mobile photo sharing, video sharing and social networking service with 160 million monthly active users globally, 65 million photos uploaded every day and a billion likes per day. It enables its users to take pictures and videos, apply digital filters and a caption and then share them on a variety of social networking platforms, creating a wall of pictures that people can ‘like’ or comment on. Instagram makes it easy to create stunning photos that make individuals and ultimately businesses, look professional and creative.

Tumblr

As one of the most prevalent micro-blogging sites, Tumblr has become phenomenal in recent years. The service allows users to post multimedia and other content to a short-form blog. Users can follow other users’ blogs, as well as make their own private blogs. By mid-January 2014, Tumblr has 166.4 millions of users and 73.4 billions of posts. Tumblr provides hybrid micro-blogging services: intermediate quality content and intermediate social interactions. Since Tumblr has a strong presence of photos, it is natural to compare it to other image-based social networks like Instagram and Pinterest

The basic differences between Pinterest, Instagram and Tumblr:

• On Tumblr, one has a flexibility to post a short text, audio, image, and video, but Pinterest and Instagram are only restricted to images and videos. While all three sites have inclination toward image sharing and social networking, Tumblr is less of an image-bookmarking or image-sharing platform and more of micro-blogging tool. On other hand, Pinterest and Instagram allow texts and video posting but gives greater emphasis on image sharing (Taylor 2013, p. 25)