doteduguru

I know I know it’s been almost a month and a half since the end of 2007 and I have had this report sitting around for over a month, but better late than never right? 

2007 is the first year that we have a complete years worth of analytical data for wofford.edu with Google Analytics.  I put the following data together for Wofford a few weeks ago and thought there might be some value in sharing it here.  I’d be extremely interested in learning if other Colleges and Universities have similar results.  I’d be really interested to continue this conversation with anyone that’s interested in digging down more into the data.

Data observations

• Over 33% of our total page views were the homepage (over 2.4 million views)
• Over 56% of our traffic came directly to the site (meaning through a bookmark in favorites, wofford.edu set as homepage, or typing wofford.edu into a browser
• Only 25% of traffic sources was from search engines
• Less than 2% used Dialup connection
• Over 79% browsed the site using Internet Explorer (over 99% being IE6 or IE7). Firefox was second with 14% (1.5 or better).
• 92% of visits are on Windows machines
• Monday is almost always the busiest day of the week and the week usually gets less busy going towards the weekend
• 65% of visits last 10 seconds or less and 61% only visit one page
• Less than 5% of visits view the site on 800×600 or less
• 99% have flash installed, 94% have version 8 or better
• 99.6% have Java support enabled
• 56% of visits were from off campus locations
• Among sites that sent people to wofford, soconsports, woffordfyi, facebook, sciway, and terrierfans sent the most visitors.
• 78% of search engine traffic came from Google. Yahoo was second with 10%.
• 81% of visits entered through the homepage first 

Analysis

• Far and away the homepage is the most important page on the site as it accounts for so much a large percentage of individual’s web experience with Wofford. 
• Users that visit the site possess high standards to for view including high resolution monitors, multimedia plug-ins (java & flash), high speed connections, and use powerful web browsing tools (latest versions of IE or Firefox). 
• Wofford relies heavily on its brand recognition to get visitors to their site. This is shown by the high percentage that comes directly and 17 out of the top 20 keyword searches include Wofford. This accounts for 81% of directly measured traffic, but this number is realistically over 90%.
• Victories in sporting events create spikes in visits to wofford.edu as users are introduced to the institution and want to discover more about it.

Moving forward

• Getting links strategically placed in new locations to expose Wofford to new audiences
• Make sure that the homepage is absolutely as good as it possibly can be and easy to navigate to increase engagement
• As our users are using optimal machines for a multimedia rich experience then we must meet this by providing them with this experience.