The other week Shelby Thayer wrote an excellent post titled, Instantly Actionable – The 404 Page.  Reading through her post got me thinking this is definitely a Web Standard that every site needs to implement properly, but very few take the time to do it.  Nobody likes to see an ugly “The page cannot be found” error page.  This has to be one of the quickest ways for a visitor to leave a site and has to have a high exit rate on this page, but most people don’t even track this page so they have no way of knowing even this little bit of information.  Just for the record since I started tracking this two weeks ago the exit rate is only 29%.  Not as bad as I would have thought, but definitely higher than the site as a whole.

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So many many months ago in what was the third post of this blog I asked the question, Which search engines really matter?  In that post I pulled data from Compete’s monthly post about web search market share that showed Google dominating with almost 69% of the US market.  So fast forward eight months later (can you believe this blog is eight months old!?) and Google is now a dominating 70.4% of the US web search market.  At the time I wanted to see how this national trend held up for Wofford and at the time did some tweaking to Wofford’s search submissions to the other two main search market players, Yahoo and MSN.  Since making these changes I thought they might have an impact on Google’s dominance of searches that return traffic to Wofford’s site (over 80% then). I think to be totally fair before moving forward I need to analyzes what percentage of Wofford’s search traffic is domestic.  Keep in mind this data is only for wofford.edu as pulled from Google Analytics over the last month. Read the rest of this entry »

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Boy did Andrew not have any idea what he was invoking the other day when he posted about the Ad Age 150. In what turned out to be an interesting Monday and I read about multiple bloggers who rejected this idea to spend two minutes to submit their blog to a Marketing Ranking service. What’s so ironic is the debate has taken exponentially longer than the amount of time it takes to submit, you have to love a good debate! If you don’t want to do it no problem that’s your decision, but something has been eating at me and as I laid down in bed last night one of those few barely twitching electrons is my head hit a spark that can only be described as a nuclear reaction. Anyone who’s considering starting a blog be warned because those nights where you used to sleep peacefully will now be consumed with an unending river of blog post ideas and occasionally the dam will burst and a tidal wave will crash down impeding sleep until you have the flick of a thought on paper. Here goes.

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So I’ve got some upcoming presentations this year about Web Analytics for Higher Education and me being the anti procrastinator that I am have started to think about exactly what could I possibly say, like I have EVER had a problem with that before. This past weekend one of those moments of enlightenment came over me and I present to you my full definition of Web Analytics 2.0. (Ok so I’ve done a little more research and Avinash Kaushik has already coined the term and has his own definition, but just like Web 2.0 there are many definitions and everyone has their own interpretation. Also Avinash if you happen to read this, I just want you to know I’m a HUGE fan! Maybe your initial WA 2.0 advice that I’m sure I’ve read before finally just sunk in, who knows?) Read the rest of this entry »

May was a month of celebration and closure. Graduation came and went and many students are moving on to bigger and better things now. Unfortunately this doesn’t necessarily translate well for Website Traffic. As you would imagine traffic across the sites were down, but there are some positive takeaways if you look at the trends.

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I just wanted to share some quick data from a board of trustee’s committee presentation that I made yesterday. Two specific slides stood out as something I thought would be neat to share.
(Click on the images for larger versions)

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A while back I read a post over on SEOmoz about popular web browser toolbars and their value from a web developer or internet marketer perspective. It was a wonderful article that I highly recommend. This article had me thinking, this list is great but what about Higher Education professionals? I’ve been working on a list and actually had a conversation with Chris Strauber our Web Service Librarian about it. Somewhere deep down I guess I kind of feel like a web person putting together a list of Firefox add-ons that you use is sort of a requirement, right!? For the most part many of these are the standards that everyone has installed, but hopefully you will see something that that you just didn’t know about. So here is my list.

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Just a quick post on a Monday morning. Hopefully everyone had a great weekend. I finished compiling the monthly web analytics on Friday, but didn’t get around to sharing. This month is the first to have full data for off-campus traffic and blog data pulled through Google Analytics. For information about how to track off site traffic or specifically not include traffic from an IP range please see my Google Analytics 101 post.

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Website Grader is one of those excellent free resources that I run on sites about once a month. In it its own words: Read the rest of this entry »