Author: Freerk Polling

Visitors

Posted on by Freerk Polling

Even though I have not done anything yet, I started to get some comments on some of the posts. Posts mainly created to see how the layout works, to get a little bit of an idea how to proceed.

All comments are spam coming from Russia. I guess that is something we need to learn to live with. The onslaught of Russian nonsense.

Somehow they don’t seem to show up in Google Analytics, so I guess there are bots at work, not people. But at least it will not mess up the Analytics later, so that is a good thing.

I did notice some google traffic. Since there is no content on the site, I presume people have googled my name and ended up here in the hope to learn something about me.

Wrong place for that, but at least is show that my Tag Manager is set up correctly, so that is a good start.

Google Tag Manager

Posted on by Freerk Polling

One of the things about Google Analytics is the exclusion of your own visits when you check things on your site. All articles you find are about excluding your IP address.  That requires you to have a static IP address and since I have a dynamic IP address and use several devices, I needed a different solution.

After a little bit of search I ran into http://carloseo.com/exclude-dynamic-ip-google-analytics/ and I decided to try it.

Since I had not set up Google Tag Manager yet, I created an account and use the “Head, Footer and Post Injections” plugin to insert the code into my site.

After following his tutorial I was able to see all visits in Google Analytics and not myself.

Google Analytics

Posted on by Freerk Polling

The most logical place to start our analytics is Google Analytics. It is free, so the price is right and it is easy to get started.

There is also a lot of documentation available about google analytics and how to set it up. Part of the problem is that there are apparently many ways to skin this cat, and as a eesult it can get quite confusing.

Although this site is not necessarily a tutorial about google analytics, We will document my trials and errors and see whether we can set it up correctly.

Initial Decisions

Posted on by Freerk Polling

When starting a site, there are a lot of decisions to be made. As a site owner you want all your decision to be perfect. You are looking for the right color, the right images, the right layout, and before you know it, you get lost in details.

As we went through the process to set up my site, we realized the decisions we make do not matter. If the site is about changes to the site, and the effects of those changes, the initial setup is just a starting point. Any decision we make right now, will be challenge by us very soon anyway. After that we were up and running quickly.

A few decisions were quick one. We wanted to create a blog so we decided to try out WordPress. Once that decision had been made, the site was set up very quickly. There are thousands of options for a WordPress site, so we just picked one that was convenient for us.

A few minutes later we had the site up and running. All we needed was a layout. We picked out a layout that we liked, Activello. Partly because it was free. Whether my audience it also likes, we don’t know. But since we don’t have an audience yet, it does not really matter at this point. Hopefully we will build an audience soon, which will allow us to make some better informed decisions.

The only plugin that we added at this point was Analytify – A Google Analytics Dashboard. After all if we want to use the traffic on this site to create a better site, we will need to know all about out traffic.

A New Website

Posted on by Freerk Polling

You have a new website.

It is a wonderful site with all the information anyone can possibly need.

All you need is traffic.

This is a new website.  A site without content yet. A site without traffic.  This is an attempt to make this into a successful website.

This website is about that journey.