Analyzing Traffic on the Lane Website

I was on a bike ride through West Eugene the other day, and I got to thinking about people that visit the Lane Website. What is it they’re looking for? What pages do they go to? Where do they come from? What web browsers do they use? Where are they from? I couldn’t wait to get home and find out.

So as soon as I got home, I fired up Google Analytics and started digging around. It wasn’t long before I realized that I wasn’t going to just find a couple quick answers to my questions. Every answer I found raised two questions. There was a lot of exploring to do. So over the next few months, every Friday I’m going to try to make a post about analyzing some particular aspect of our website. Hopefully it’ll help us refine the designs we’ve been working with for the website redesign.

We’ve been tracking visits to the Lane homepage since 2008, giving us lots of data to work with. So much with that it’s almost impossible to draw any conclusions – think about how things have changed on the Internet in the last five years! So, for the purposes of this analysis, we’ll mostly be working with data from the last year – Oct 15, 2011 to Oct 15, 2012.

While we analyze that data, it’s helpful to keep some simple statistics in the back of your mind, just to help frame things. This way you’ll have an anchor in mind – so that if I tell you that some website sent us 150 visits last year, you’ll know that isn’t many when you’re talking about a website that sees 4.8 million visits a year. Here’s the stats:

Bounce rate is a helpful term to know – it simply means the number of people that saw one page and left. A high bounce rate is good on some websites, where people just go for quick bits of information (like a thesaurus). But on our website, where we want people to learn and explore a little, we generally want a low bounce rate.

Next week I’ll post about how people actually find the Lane Website, and I’ll try to update this post with links to subsequent posts as we go:

• Where do visitors go? Analyzing the pages people search for and visit on our site.
• Where do visitors come from? Analyzing what websites send us traffic
• What types of computers visit our Website? Analyzing the characteristics of the devices our visitors use.

And now’s a good a time as any to plug what we can do with Analytics for your website. If you’ve got a website on campus and you’re interested in how people find and use your website, send Lori Brenden or me an email. We’ll hook you up.