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)
Heat mapping
Heat mapping is a great way to visually see where traffic visiting your site clicks. It enables you to understand usability habits. I signed up for a month’s worth of service from CrazyEgg and ran four weekly test on the homepage. I think what’s most apparent is that our left hand navigation menu is definitely doing what it is intended to do and specifically driving lots of students to the Admission or Prospective Student section of the site. I won’t bore you with lots of other observations, but I will say that it is interesting that the heatmap looks surprisingly similar every week.
Monthly Blog Facts
I still have it on the backburner to write a post describing Wofford’s Blogs, but this slide is very simple and provides some quick data about Wofford’s blogging program specifically related to First Year Bloggers. In my opinion blogging isn’t the way to reach prospective students, but I have a strong feeling their parents read them and that’s still very important. From the data presented on this monthly snapshot people are visiting and reading our blogs. It’s also important to keep in mind that most RSS subscribers read posts through a feedreader and never visit the site so their tracking data isn’t accounted.
Our blog software does track RSS reads, and it accounted for 2.9% of our blog hits. Our bloggers averaged about 3800 hits each, so just extrapolating that 32% increase for your 5,000 average, I’d say you could estimate 1,275 RSS views on that. Let me know if you want the math!
Interesting. I do have the data, but it’s in Feedburner, but I’ll take your word on the % because it’s way to much work to really dig into each individual blog. I can’t wait until GA integrated Feedburner stats!
What blog software are ya’ll using? Head tags say something about CommunityServerand WASP says you have GA installed on the pages.
I used trial version of ClickDensity https://clickdensity.com/ on our current homepage. It helped as I worked on the new design, giving me data on should and should be there. I would love to sign up for an account, so that I can demonstrate which news items get more traffic.