Collecting Primary And Secondary Data Types

Here is an example of something concerning one of my website’s primary and secondary data types I have been thinking and somehow working on in the past 6 months.

Site: www.borislavkiprin.com
Site objectives: Exhibit my photography to the online community.
Site goal: Reach 1000 visits per month and receive feedback regularly on photos I publish.

Collecting Primary & Secondary Data Types:

Behavioural – I use primary Google Analytics that is allowing me to gain insights on
- Where my visits come from? – China, Spain, USA, Bulgaria
- Visits (0.48/day)
- Average page view (21)
- Average time spent on site (00:01:07)
- Bounce rate (66.67%)

As you can see the website is well ill-performing behind the set goal.

Attitudinal – why is this happening?
- I run a focus group on different occasions watching friends browsing through the website, and I established that the architecture is too complicated and lacks intuitiveness. This was identified as the main reason for the low page view, bounce and the average time spent on the site.
Competitive – what are other photographers doing to gain more exposure to their work?
- Since there is an abundance of photographic portfolio display websites on the Internet, I have focused on players within the 1000 visits per month (mainly friends or photographers I know).
- I discovered that most of them use PHP, HTML and CSS coding. Whereas my website has tons of iFrames that did not allow SE robots to read the data published in them. In other words, I am skipping on SE inbound delivered traffic.
- I also noticed that most of them were adding value by giving background info and tips on how they got the photograph. I am not doing that due to coding and space limitations.
- WordPress seems to be the most popular web base complying SEO (Search Engine Optimization) features and SMO(Social Media Optimization) ones.
Segmentation analysis – who are my site visitors? I have identified mainly two types of visitors.
- Photographers – Fellow photo makers that are seeking new ideas, post-production editing techniques and photo composition. These users need more technical and background information about how the photo was made and what was the rationale/vision behind photo edits.
- Friends/Family/Spectators – this type of users is simply driven by the curiosity of where I have been and what I saw through my lens or simply love to see a good photo every now and then.

Conclusions & Next Steps:

Redesign of the site structure, coding and platform.
Offer more information and view on each photo published.
Offer new photos regularly – 1 each week, for example.
Work on SEO and SMO.
Decided to go for a WordPress blogging platform with an already identified template.
Timeline: – start working on it as soon as I graduate from IE and get it up and running by the end of April 2010.
Budget – 200 USD for template purchase and upgrade of hosting services and space.
Collecting reports every week and change ill-performing features and issues.

I know it is not very extensive, but it should give a starting point for those who are not very knowledgeable in digital marketing auditing, collecting data types, and needing some info on it.