The purpose behind our website and blog is twofold: to provide information on all aspects of artificial eyes; and to encourage the sharing of other people’s experiences. To be certain that we are giving our customers what they want and need, though, we need more than just comments on our blog posts. We have to know if anyone is viewing our content.
Google has a great tool called Google Analytics which fulfils this purpose. With Google Analytics, we gather all sorts of information about who is visiting our site. For example, we can bring up a map of the world which shows where our visitors are coming from through the use of dots. By clicking on these dots, we can see, for instance, that somebody from Fountain View on the west coast of America frequently visits our site. To date, we’ve attracted people from many parts of the world, including America, Europe, India, Canada, Indonesia, the Middle East and all over Australia.
With this tool, we can also see which of our web pages and blogs people frequent the most. This helps us to design our web content and blog posts around what people are finding the most useful.
To attract visitors to our site – also known in the web industry as driving traffic to a site – we’ve used another Google tool called Google AdWords. What this ultimately means is that an ad for our site appears next to a list of search results that are displayed after certain keywords are entered into Google. To find the keywords that fit best with our business, we’ve had to do some research into the terms people use when looking for information about artificial eyes. This takes a bit of time, but is worth it in the long run.
Using Google AdWords doesn’t cost us anything unless someone clicks on our ad which pops up in their list of search results. And then, it only costs us ten cents a click, which is minimal if it meets our goal of bringing more people to our site, and thereby disseminating important information on artificial eyes to more people throughout the world.
In the not too distant past, the mere thought of technology had us fleeing from the computer. But these days we are hooked. Now we become glued to the screen, checking out how many people have visited in the last week, where they are from and which pages they have viewed. Unfortunatley, Google has recently upgraded its interface and removed the map! As this is our favourite feature, we use the old interface where we can still access the map with its fascinating dots.
But there’s one more thing we’d like to know that Google Analytics can’t tell us. And that is, who are the people visiting us? Are they wearers of artificial eyes, or family members? Or are they ocularists, ophthalmologists, medical students, doctors or teachers? Only you can answer that question for us. So next time you drop by, we’d love you to click on ‘Contact Us’ and jot a quick note to let us know who you are, where you’re from and what you like about our site.
