A new way to view programs

A quick update on progress we’ve made on our web team goals.

Goal 1: We’ve made progress on launching refreshed program pages. Aviation Maintenance Technology faculty drafted virtually all their own content, and provided us with an awesome tour. Networking also went live, just this week, with updated content. I’m hopeful we’ll be launching two more right around the start of the next term.

We also launched a couple of pages for transfer programs that we hadn’t previously advertised:

Of course, a program titled “Other” anything isn’t going to be terribly glamorous page, but it’s the best solution we’ve found for things like advertising – we don’t offer an advertising program and we don’t have a bunch (if any) advertising classes. But we’re a completely valid, cost effective start to transferring to major in advertising elsewhere. That said, those programs were fairly repetitive to write, so I probably won’t count those 5 toward our goals.

Goal 2:  We’ve launched a new way to view all the different programs and transfer areas we offer at Lane. You can now browse our programs in one place, rather than having to check each department’s website, and you can see them organized by career community. We’re hopeful this sorter will also support guided pathways at Lane. Goal accomplished!

Goal 3: We’re actually tracking fairly well on this goal, with Organic Search sessions 4.46% higher than they were over a similar time period last year. Unfortunately, new sessions are down, so while we may be on track to meet this goal, we’re not necessarily attracting the right kind of traffic.

Goal 4: There’s work happening on this one, but nothing to report yet. Expect news early next year. In the mean time, if you have any thoughts on things the Lane website does well, things it does poorly, or things you wish it would do, let me know in the comments below!

 

Evaluating Goal progress, 17-18

All year we’ve been tracking progress on our web team goals. But now the year is over, and it’s time to reflect. We definitely made a lot of progress on some of our goals, but on others there’s only bad news.

1. Reduce the total number of pages on the Lane website by 5% (from 5550 to 5273)

We exceeded this goal, reducing the total number of pages by 18.3%, rather than just 5%. But it turns out this was not a well written goal. Of the 1,018 of pages we eliminated, 558 of them were Lane in the News items, which aren’t really pages at all.

This goal had a problem with language versus measurement. Drupal stores content internally as “nodes”. This is fairly easy to count – select count(*) from node. But there’s a number of types of content on the website that aren’t really pages but are nodes. Lane in the News items are one type, but we also have slideshow slides, FAQ questions, and landing page announcements. So while those content types count for the purposes of our metric, they probably shouldn’t.

Fortunately, we still deleted 460 actual pages, so we handily met this goal. But if we set a goal like this again, we’ll probably exclude certain content types (not only the ones previously mentioned, but also news releases and board policies).

2. Reduce the number of pages with more than 15,000 characters by 10% (from 249 to 224)

While we certainly met this goal, this count has increased yet again, from 144 pages last check-in to 145. These pages remain mostly meeting minutes and policy documents. If we do a goal like this again, we should probably limit what content types we look at.

It’d be really nice if there were an easy way to count words, rather than characters, but that ends up being a very difficult problem, especially when our content includes HTML mixed in.

3. Reduce the average character count of our pages by 10% (from 4650 to 4185)

For reasons similar to goal #2, we should probably have limited what content types we looked at. We wound up at 4,194 characters, which is close to our goal. This is likely not a goal we’ll continue though, as longer form content isn’t necessarily a terrible idea.

4. Improve the average age of our pages (the average late updated date) by 4 months (from 16 months to 12 months)

We’ve stayed steady on this goal since last post, at 17 months old. This remains one of our most difficult tasks. Despite the web team making more than 3,000 page revisions in the last year, more than 20% of the pages on the website haven’t been edited in more than 3 years – and many of the revisions we made were just link changes or typos. We’re often not qualified to do content changes. Please give us a hand!

Traffic Goals

We also had two traffic goals:

  1. Increase session counts for www.lanecc.edu during the period 6/14/17-6/14/18 compared to the previous year by 5%, from 3,228,904 to 3,390,349
  2. Decrease the bounce rate for www.lanecc.edu during the period 6/14/17-6/14/18 compared to the previous year by 5%, from 37.05% to 35.19%

Unfortunately, we met neither of these goals. We fell the furthest behind on pageviews, where we fell 14.24%. We did improve our bounce rate by 1.11%, but that’s a long way from our 5% goal. We did have a couple of wins, which seem to indicate a more engaged audience. Average session duration is longer, people are viewing more pages per session, more sessions are from new visitors, and organic search traffic is up.

In retrospect, while these were a good first attempt at goals, future goals should be more carefully targeted to what we’re trying to accomplish on the web at Lane. For instance, we could look at the percentages of traffic that come via organic search or referral, or we could look at tracking the percentage of people who request information about the college.

Goal Check-in #5

This is our last check-ins on progress for our web team goals. The next progress post will be to evaluate how well we did and establish new goals.

1. Reduce the total number of pages on the Lane website by 5% (from 5550 to 5273)

Regretfully, this number has slid up even further, from 5003 to 5107. Much of this has been due to news releases and in the news items (where we track mentions of Lane in news media). Next time we create goals, we’ll definitely be using a much more limited subset of page types. There’s still a bunch of open tasks to eliminate some pages, but progress is likely to be slow, as we’ve had to prioritize other work.

2. Reduce the number of pages with more than 15,000 characters by 10% (from 249 to 224)

Somehow, this measure also increased slightly again, from 141 pages to 144 pages. These pages remain primarily internal pages.

3. Reduce the average character count of our pages by 10% (from 4650 to 4185)

With an increase in the count of longer pages, we’ve also had an increase in average page length. As mentioned last goal, this goal is no longer really one of our goals, as we’re deliberately using some longer form content. But I still don’t like that we’ve slipped to 4,140 characters.

4. Improve the average age of our pages (the average late updated date) by 4 months (from 16 months to 12 months)

We’ve stayed steady on this goal since last post, staying at 17 months old. This remains one of our most difficult tasks, and we’d appreciate any help you can provide.

Traffic Goals

We also had two traffic goals:

  1. Increase session counts for www.lanecc.edu during the period 6/14/17-6/14/18 compared to the previous year by 5%, from 3,228,904 to 3,390,349
  2. Decrease the bounce rate for www.lanecc.edu during the period 6/14/17-6/14/18 compared to the previous year by 5%, from 37.05% to 35.19%

Since these are annual goals, they’re a little harder to compare against. But we can compare similar time periods. For the first ten months, 6/14-4/14, comparing 2016/17 to 2017/18, our session counts have decreased by 13.67%, and our bounce rate has shrunk by 0.83%. This is a bit of an improvement on our bounce rate, but our session counts remain crushing. A glimmer of hope: new sessions are up 8.26%, and average session duration is up 9.98%.

Unfortunately, we’re no longer seeing the increase in traffic on the redeveloped traffic that we used to see, though we are at least seeing level traffic on program pages.

Last post in this series will be in June, when we’ll lay out some new goals for next year.

Mobile Traffic Milestone

Graph of mobile traffic, showing a clear pattern of year over year growth, including one day when 20% of visitors were mobile.
Percentage of visitors each day using a mobile device over the last two years

Last Sunday, for the first time ever, more than 20% of visitors to the website were mobile. And I don’t think the general trend can be missed: we’re up 38% on mobile compared to last year. Just more proof that we can’t ignore mobile when thinking about the web.

Also interesting? I was surprised to find that Saturdays and Sundays are our biggest mobile days. Each of the small spikes on the graph (not the gigantic ones) is a weekend. Anyone have any ideas why?

Changes in Drupal Land

There’s a couple changes happening in Drupal that you might want to be aware of:

Google Analytics Modifications

Currently, we’re using the old style Google Analytics embed code, and adding it directly via our template in html.tpl.php. This works, but it isn’t optimal. For a long time we’ve known that there’s a couple users that use the website in a way that doesn’t reflect real visitors: the Lane Web Team.

To take me as an example, yesterday I looked for old links to www2 urls, and found them on sixty different pages. I directly navigated to each of those pages, stayed on them for about fifteen seconds, loaded the edit window, made a change, saved the page, and left, directly navigating to another page. The statistics for that day are now ever so slightly skewed toward a person that appears to change pages at random, staying on them for almost no time at all, and who appears to come from nowhere. I’m making it harder to understand what people do on our website, and how we can serve their needs. And it isn’t just me – the whole webteam could tell a similar story.

So, this weekend 9/20/14, we’ll be installing the Google Analytics module. With it, the tracking code will automatically be disabled for our administrative roles, who together represent a disproportionate number of visits. How does this impact you? Soon it will look like our traffic numbers went down – probably about 2% – just because we’re not tracking those three roles. So, if you get an analytics report mailed to you, don’t be too alarmed if the numbers go down, just adapt to the new baseline. And remember, you can always contact us if you’d like help thinking through your analytics numbers.

Friendlier URLs

By default, Drupal uses ugly URLs. The contact page is technically something like lanecc.edu/index.php?q=node/106. We’re using a couple of modules (Path Alias, part Drupal Core, and Pathologic) to make those urls look friendlier, like lanecc.edu/contact. But, ever notice what happens when you try to edit a page? You get another ugly url, like lanecc.edu/node/106/edit. This weekend, we’re also going to try to fix those, using the Extended Path Alias module. All of those pages that previously had a node number in them will now have a nice, aliased URL, like lanecc.edu/contact/edit.

I’m sure that doesn’t seem very exciting. But it is, because when someone submits a webform, they were previously taken to a confirmation page with an alias like lanecc.edu/node/86/submission/75309. Because that url starts with /node, Drupal isn’t able to figure out which menus to include, meaning the person that just submitted your webform is effectively no longer on your part of the website.

Of course, by replacing all those technical looking URLs with friendly ones, that makes it harder for you to tell us the node number, or to paste a node number into the link dialog when editing a page. So we’re also going to make it easier to find those node numbers – starting next week, just look to the right side of your screen while logged in and you’ll find a little black tab with the node number written on it.

EDIT (7/9) – Unfortunately, we had to roll this one back. With this enabled, /it/somepage.html would actually go to /it/, meaning no 404 was served. We’re still looking for a solution at this time.

Print Styles

This one is actually live right now! We’ve added a print style sheet to the pages, which attempts to make webpages more useful when printed out on paper. It’ll probably work best in Firefox or Chrome, but when you print:

  • The left menu will be hidden
  • The header of the page will be hidden, except for the department title (if present)
  • The megamenu will be hidden
  • The footer will be hidden, except on the landing pages
  • Links will have their urls added to them, so that if you stumble across a link in a printed page that you’re interested in, you can at least type that link into a browser manually.

If you notice any bugs (There’s a LOT of printers on this campus, and its impossible for me to test all of them), please let me know.

What types of Computers Visit?

Recently, the Webteam was tasked with formalizing the procedures we use for testing websites and applications for cross browser compatibility. When we put together our initial design, we tested against 17 different browser/operating system configurations in person, then looked at another few dozen configurations through browsershots.org. Thanks to all our testing, so far we’ve only had one browser issue – which is only in one version of Chrome, on one version of Windows, on one particular screen resolution. I’m pretty happy with that.

But browser popularity changes, and people are regularly upgrading their devices. It’s been over a year since we last launched a design. Charged with formalizing procedures or not, as we get ready to develop a new theme for the Lane website, it’s time to take a look at what devices are accessing our website.

For this data set, we’re actually only going to look at data from the last month – Oct 6, 2012 to Nov 5, 2012. We won’t be getting as complete a picture, but we also won’t see traffic from earlier this year, before some of the more recent browsers were even launched. We’ll start with a super high overview, then dig in deeper.

Browsers & Operating Systems

Popularity of different browsers at Lane

Popularity of differnet operating systems of people visiting the Lane website

So from this data we can conclude that the average (median) person visiting the Lane website is a Windows user with Firefox. Of course, we know that there’s a ton of different browser versions out there, so the story might be much more complex. But this data is still useful. Doing the same sort of extensive testing we do with the main website (millions of visits a year) with all of our sites (example: this blog, which sees about 4,000 visits a year) would be prohibitively time consuming and expensive. Testing on the latest versions of Firefox, Chrome, and IE on Windows, and then Safari on a Mac is probably good enough for most of our smaller sites.

But let’s go deeper.

Browser popularity broken down by version

Whoa! Sorry you can’t click the little down arrow and see all three pages of the key. I’m only looking at the top 100 browser versions, and I’m combining minor version numbers (treating Firefox 3.6.3 and Firefox 3.6.5 as just Firefox 3.6.x). That still leaves us with 39 different browser/version combinations.

Turns out that the average person is actually an Internet Explorer 9 user. And their operating system:

Operating Systems broken down by Browsers

As expected, most people use Windows. There’s no way to generate a graph of browser, version, and operating system (and it might be too complex anyway!), so we’ll have to conclude our analysis here. But we’ve learned a few things. For one, Safari on Windows, Chrome Frame, and Linux all aren’t important to us. And we’re probably ok to stick with our high level testing plan for basic sites – it’ll still cover a majority of users.

Screen Resolutions

Screen resolutions are usually listed as number of pixels wide by number of pixels tall. Pixels tall can be useful to know, as it helps us determine where the “fold” is. But at this stage we’re mostly concerned with width, since that more directly impacts layout. This used to be simple to do, but with the advent of tablets that rotate their orientation, screen width has become a little more fluid: 1024×768 and 768×1024 might actually be the same device. For the purposes of our analysis, we’ll just assume that tablets don’t rotate. As long as we’ve set our media queries appropriately, things should still work.

Screen widths of computers that visit Lane

There’s something else to consider here. A device that’s 1024 pixels wide will have trouble displaying a webpage that’s 1600 pixels wide. But there’s no issue the other way. So we’re really looking for a lowest common denominator. In this case, I’d submit that our lowest common screen resolution is 1024×768. It’s ancient, yes, but it’s also the standard resolution on most tablets.

In our case, we set our media queries up as:

  • Global: <740px
  • Narrow: 740px to 979px
  • Normal: 980px to 1219px
  • Wide: >1220px

Is this a good fit? I think so. It a content area gets to be too wide, it gets to be hard to read. So though it’d be totally justified to have a media query for browsers that are greater than 1400 px wide, I’d argue that it’d be hard to maintain the same look and feel without decreasing readability. And we should be ok with the tablet assumptions we made earlier – most should jump between narrow and normal view depending on orientation, but shouldn’t fall to a cell phone optimized view.

Java Support

28.38% of visitors reported no Java support. Although its a free plugin, we should probably seek alternatives whenever possible.

Flash Support

Although Google Analytics doesn’t provide us with a simple way to check Flash support, we can assume that “(Not Set)” is a reasonable guess at “Not Supported”. In this case, about 13% of our visitors don’t support Flash. Since 7-8% of our traffic is mobile, and we know that iOS devices don’t support Flash, this sounds about right. The lack of support we’re seeing here is a good reason for us to try to move away from Flash on our pages wherever possible.

Mobile Devices

Compared to this time last year, mobile traffic is up 50%. We’ve got to keep thinking mobile. What devices do people use? iPhones. Followed by iPads. In fact, the next 10 devices put together only add up to 1/3 the traffic we get from iPhones. For every Android device visiting a page, there were 2 iOS devices visiting that same page.

But Androids aren’t insignificant. In fact, more people visit via Android than people do via IE7. So let’s have a look:

Android verions at Lane

It looks Android 2.x hasn’t quite gone away, although we seem to have skipped Android 3. When testing phones, we should probably be sure to find a mix of Android 2.2, 2.3, and 4.0 devices.

What Now?

Now that we’ve drawn together all our data, its time to make some decisions about testing procedures. We’ll convene as a web team, go through all our data, and try to come up with a check-list. Except to see some further details soon!

How do visitors find us?

Last time, we analyzed where people go on the Lane website. This time, we’re going to wonder how they found the Lane website in the first place.

Sources of traffic to Lane's website
That’s right. This post has pictures.

We’ve analyzed our Search Traffic to death, and right now our Campaigns (targeted emails and such) aren’t a significant source of traffic. Direct traffic isn’t very interesting, since it’s just people that type our URL into the address bar of their browser (or are referred from an evil website that prevents us from seeing referral information – more on that later). But we can learn a lot from Referral Traffic, which we can define as visits from people who found us by clicking on a link on another website.

Of course, not all referral traffic is equally interesting. I exported the top 500 referral sites (anyone who has sent at least 52 visitors last year) to a spreadsheet, and went to work.

Search Traffic graph to Lane

The vast majority of our referral traffic to www.lanecc.edu is actually traffic from another one of our Lane websites – Moodle, MyLane, etc. So let’s ignore those for now – although unifying navigation is a goal, we can’t also do that in this blog post. While we’re at it, let’s ignore the 7% of referral traffic that came from search that Google Analytics didn’t identify. I’m being a little generous at what constitutes search – people that are squatting on a domain and putting a search bar on it to collect ad revenue should really count as “Bad People”, but we’ll pretend they’re legitimate search engines here.

We’ll also ignore AskLane, our Knowledge Base about Lane. It’s a useful tool, but people generally find it from a Lane website, so we shouldn’t count it as a distinct referrer.

Referral Traffic to Lane without traffic from Lane, Search, or AskLane

That’s better. It’s also not entirely accurate. The number of people who come to the Lane website via Email is likely much higher, but some email providers make it impossible to see that they were the referrer – even Google’s own email service. If you’re a department here on campus, and you’re thinking about sending out a mass email, come talk to us first – there’s things we can do to make it super easy to identify who’s clicking your email links.

Let’s look at each of the other categories one by one. Keep comparing each category against the overall averages – referral traffic averages 2.98 pages/visitor, about 4 minutes on site per visitor, with a new traffic rate of 23% and a bounce rate of 55%.

Social Referrals

Google Analytics actually provides a much more comprehensive interface for analyzing Social traffic. So we’ll augment our data set.

Social Traffic to Lane Graph.

I think that graph kind of speaks for itself. And forget about the other 13 Social Networks (including Tumblr, MySpace and Pinterest), who send so little traffic that they don’t even show up. But is there a difference in the quality of traffic from Social Networks?

Pages per Visit

I think it’s clear that yes, there is a difference. For pages per visit, we want the bar to be as high as possible – an indicator that the average visitor not only came to the site, but they then explored some other pages. In this case, the clear winner is Naver – a Korean Search and Social Networking Site. The biggest losers are Delicious and Facebook. So even though Facebook sends us 92% of our referral traffic, most of those visitors only view one page and then leave.

Bounce Rate for Social Traffic

We see a similar pattern in Bounce Rates (percent of people who view a page then leave. Facebook and Delicious have terrible Bounce Rates. Twitter (shown as t.co, since t.co is Twitter’s URL shortening service, and thus is the referrer) fares only a little better. But both Google Plus and LinkedIn tend to send us visitors that visit at least one other page. They also tend to send us more visitors that are new – 16% and 19%, respectively, compared to 9% for Facebook and 4% for Twitter.

Lessons? Facebook is so big that its impossible to ignore, but its also some of the worst traffic. Don’t ignore the other networks.

Government Referrals

Visitors from government websites have better than average statistics. Here’s the complete list:

Source Visits Pages / Visit Avg. Visit Duration % New Visits Bounce Rate
ltd.org 5642 2.24 0:02:48 8.53% 63.58%
oregon.gov 3354 4.24 0:03:37 58.86% 36.49%
stateoforegon.com 1780 3.65 0:02:53 78.71% 43.54%
eugene-or.gov 750 3.87 0:03:22 52.93% 47.07%
cms.oregon.gov 616 4.39 0:06:38 43.18% 29.87%
public.health.oregon.gov 539 4.02 0:05:20 63.45% 33.58%
ode.state.or.us 133 2.98 0:02:25 33.08% 51.13%
www1.eere.energy.gov 111 3.27 0:02:54 50.45% 63.06%
ci.florence.or.us 107 4.27 0:04:25 50.47% 38.32%
odccwd.state.or.us 103 2.73 0:02:35 59.22% 57.28%
egov.oregon.gov 94 6.2 0:05:09 24.47% 19.15%
nces.ed.gov 85 6.13 0:07:30 61.18% 23.53%
ci.corvallis.or.us 75 2.83 0:01:54 52.00% 48.00%
boli.state.or.us 63 3 0:02:35 26.98% 49.21%
ci.springfield.or.us 53 2.47 0:03:59 11.32% 47.17%
Averages: 900.3 3.75267 0:03:52 44.99% 43.40%

In the interest of not writing the world’s longest blog post, I won’t go into too much detail, but there’s a lot of questions to ask. Are visitors from www1.eere.energy.gov looking for info on our Energy Management program? Are the visitors from public.health.oregon.gov looking for Health Professions information? Knowing that, can we  do anything to help those visitors?

Educational Referrals

Once again, here’s some data:

Source Visits Pages / Visit Avg. Visit Duration % New Visits Bounce Rate
oregonstate.edu 846 3.02 0:05:52 10.05% 50.00%
utexas.edu 801 2.86 0:02:10 78.28% 55.43%
lcsc.edu 786 2.72 0:02:14 49.49% 57.76%
osba.org 567 3.52 0:02:18 73.37% 45.15%
ohsu.edu 387 2.34 0:02:56 23.77% 69.51%
umpqua.edu 333 3.47 0:03:59 22.52% 52.85%
nac.uoregon.edu 331 1.17 0:00:57 0.00% 91.54%
oregoncis.uoregon.edu 330 3.86 0:03:54 36.67% 47.88%
blogs.bethel.k12.or.us 327 3.46 0:05:34 44.34% 33.64%
uodos.uoregon.edu 306 3.78 0:14:27 3.27% 37.25%
Averages 247 2.8339 0:03:50 32.59% 53.51%

The averages don’t add up right, but that’s because I’m only showing the top ten here.

Why do some of these referrers have exceptionally high (78%) new visitor rates? Let’s dig deeper into traffic from utexas.edu. In this case, it turns out that the University of Texas maintains a list of Community Colleges around the country, and this is the source of almost all of the referrals. If we follow the visitor flow of those visitors, we get this:

Traffic from utexas.edu
Click the image to see a bigger version with legible text

So there’s people in Texas, looking at a list of Community Colleges, who click a link to our website. They look at some basic informational pages, and then go away. Do they come back later? (We get 29,000 visits a year from Texas, either as direct links or Search). Digging even deeper into this visitor flow, I can see that Texans are looking at many of our pages in Spanish. Should we further develop our translated pages?

Employment Referrals

Source Visits Pages / Visit Avg. Visit Duration % New Visits Bounce Rate
qualityinfo.org 1236 3.05 0:03:49 44.09% 58.33%
worksourceoregon.org 869 2.61 0:02:46 17.38% 64.67%
eugene.craigslist.org 794 2.46 0:03:01 19.90% 59.32%
univjobs.com 556 2.42 0:00:49 69.78% 15.47%
academic360.com 368 2.46 0:00:50 65.22% 11.68%
higheredjobs.com 170 5.04 0:02:44 83.53% 37.06%
chronicle.com 55 3.55 0:04:47 80.00% 54.55%
Averages 578.2 2.981 0:04:07 23.08% 55.00%

Having dealt with more than a couple hiring committees, I’ve always been curious to see what sites with job listings send traffic our way. Strictly speaking, the above is a pretty poor list. Most of our job postings link directly to the job post at jobs.lanecc.edu, so we may not see all the traffic in the above table.

College Guide Referrals

These are websites that attempt to guide you into picking a college, or provide listings of colleges with certain programs.

Source Visits Pages / Visit Avg. Visit Duration % New Visits Bounce Rate
oregoncollegesonline.com 945 3.05 0:03:44 40.21% 52.59%
technical-schools-guide.com 433 4.01 0:02:51 62.59% 37.18%
medicalassistantschools.com 245 3.84 0:03:04 47.76% 46.53%
flightschoollist.com 235 5.55 0:04:39 66.38% 35.74%
bestaviation.net 167 7.38 0:04:55 67.07% 14.97%
communitycollegereview.com 156 2.96 0:02:30 54.49% 48.08%
nursingschools.com 142 3.47 0:03:39 78.17% 35.92%
studyusa.com 129 5.81 0:06:46 70.54% 31.78%
a2zcolleges.com 123 3.93 0:02:50 75.61% 46.34%
justflightschools.com 108 6.55 0:04:16 76.85% 22.22%
communitycollegesusa.com 106 6.09 0:07:01 44.34% 31.13%
educationatlas.com 92 2.78 0:01:35 84.78% 50.00%
artschools.com 90 4.77 0:03:06 70.00% 21.11%
braintrack.com 90 3.58 0:03:19 51.11% 32.22%
universities.com 89 3.19 0:07:07 8.99% 48.31%
collegestats.org 87 3.98 0:03:42 81.61% 37.93%
collegeview.com 83 4.23 0:04:07 54.22% 26.51%
aviationschoolsonline.com 69 5.71 0:04:10 79.71% 20.29%
campusexplorer.com 63 5 0:05:43 55.56% 22.22%
uscollegesearch.org 63 4.95 0:02:58 80.95% 34.92%
community-college.org 62 3.82 0:02:08 87.10% 46.77%
collegesearch.collegeboard.com 55 4.58 0:03:03 74.55% 29.09%
 Averages 165.09 4.51 0:03:57 64.21% 35.08%

If this wasn’t already a record long post, we could try to compare programs – do referrals for flight programs differ from referrals for health professions programs? Is there something either of these programs could learn from each other to try to drive more traffic to their pages?

News Website Referrals

Source Visits Pages / Visit Avg. Visit Duration % New Visits Bounce Rate
coder.targetednews.com 359 1.37 0:00:36 9.19% 72.14%
special.registerguard.com 155 2 0:03:44 8.39% 67.10%
eugeneagogo.com 80 2.22 0:01:48 21.25% 62.50%
eugenedailynews.com 67 2.78 0:04:07 10.45% 56.72%
oregonlive.com 57 1.98 0:00:46 45.61% 59.65%
myeugene.org 55 7.62 0:21:53 9.09% 34.55%
Averages 128.8 2.995 0:05:29 17.33% 58.78%

Here we can ask questions like: why do visitors from myeugene.org spend so long on the website?

Everybody Else

The last 18% is the hardest to figure out. Some are sites like tiki-toki.com, where we host some time lines, but aren’t really Lane webpages. Others simply don’t resolve to anything any more – it’s like that website isn’t on the Internet any more. And others appear to have been proxies that purposely disguise the referrer. But if I cut out ones that really seem to be irrelevant, and we look at the top 30, here’s what we get:

Source Visits Pages / Visit Avg. Visit Duration % New Visits Bounce Rate
nwaacc.org 1366 1.83 0:01:41 51.54% 63.98%
planeteugene.com 1179 2.61 0:01:57 39.78% 32.99%
en.wikipedia.org 1167 3.8 0:02:42 68.98% 43.70%
oregonchildcare.org 712 3.09 0:05:40 19.94% 38.06%
nweei.org 497 3.71 0:03:28 32.39% 44.27%
osaa.org 494 1.75 0:01:30 75.10% 74.90%
windustry.org 456 2.69 0:01:58 87.94% 58.99%
artshow.com 437 2.28 0:01:03 72.77% 55.61%
ocne.org 434 4.35 0:04:32 38.48% 34.10%
oregon.ctepathways.org 397 8.16 0:11:31 12.59% 40.55%
mypathcareers.org 372 4.95 0:03:52 47.58% 23.66%
capteonline.org 343 5.14 0:03:43 74.93% 11.08%
racc.org 332 2.57 0:01:14 57.23% 31.33%
league.org 263 3.09 0:04:12 37.26% 50.57%
peacehealth.org 263 2.19 0:02:20 15.59% 69.58%
adha.org 227 6.03 0:04:21 68.28% 29.96%
apta.org 214 5.78 0:04:58 71.96% 10.28%
maps.google.com 183 4.58 0:03:30 59.02% 39.89%
mtai.org 182 2.15 0:02:35 61.54% 63.74%
flashalerteugene.net 178 2.55 0:03:58 7.30% 67.42%
ratemyprofessors.com 176 2.91 0:02:10 28.41% 58.52%
florencechamber.com 161 4.27 0:04:35 44.72% 37.27%
lanecountyseniornetwork.com 156 1.93 0:02:07 25.00% 69.87%
4cnas.com 154 1.66 0:02:40 11.04% 78.57%
degreedays.net 152 2.55 0:01:31 90.79% 53.95%
startatlane.com 136 2.63 0:03:11 13.97% 57.35%
healthguideusa.org 134 3.2 0:02:25 79.10% 46.27%
wadsworth.com 134 1.18 0:00:22 85.82% 90.30%
kpflight.com 131 2.35 0:01:46 12.21% 41.98%

Lots of questions spring to mind. Our stats from Wikipedia are pretty good. But when’s the last time anyone cleaned and updated our page? (Answer: May 19th, 2011, when a paragraph was added about the Longhouse , if you don’t count the two pictures added a few weeks back) Our stats from Google Maps are also pretty good, which I’m happy to see – last year I spent a couple days improving our campus map on Google Maps using their mapmaker tool. But since those maps are community edited, is our listing still ok? Are there things we’re missing?

Also interesting is the number of websites that simply list colleges offering a degree. For example, 90% of visits from degreedays.net are new, and are probably people interested in Energy Management. Can we do anything with this data? Are each of those sites linking directly to the program? (degreedays.net does) Do we need to ask any of those sites to update their links, since we’re changing our url structure? (In this case, no – and this is actually a complex question. Email me if you’re concerned).

Conclusions

Phew. That was a lot of data. I’ve only been processing it for a couple hours and I already have dozens of questions to try to answer. But I think its all important stuff to keep in mind as we continue to refine our information architecture. Are we keeping the needs of those 300,000 referral visitors in mind? If we come back to this data in another year or two and look at our bounce rates, will they have gone down, because interesting information is easier to find due to our new Information architecture? Are there any opportunities on any of those sites to increase the number of referrals?

As always, let us know if you’d like to sit down and look through some more complete data for your department.

Where do visitors go?

One of our goals for this redesign has been to simplify the website navigation for our  visitors. We’re taking a three pronged approach:

  1. Reduce the number of pages on the site
  2. Unify navigation
  3. Simplify entry page navigation

The first one is the most rewarding – we’re getting rid of pages. So far, we’ve cut 5920 pages by either deleting or moving them to a separate archive site. Hopefully we’re narrowing the focus of our site and reducing the number of links that would take you away from what you’re looking for.

The second two approaches are much harder, and will be the focus of this post. Both require a pretty serious knowledge of where people go our our website, as well as what people are looking for. The first place we’ll look for this data is our own internal search traffic, which we graphed a few posts ago. That gives us 50,000 searches for 3700 different terms over the last three months. We’ll scale it by a factor of 4 to get an estimate of what traffic looks like over the year.

Our second source is much bigger, 1,000,000 searches on Google for 500 different terms. We can immediately throw out the 83% that are people searching for the Lane homepage. Then we can combine similar searches: in addition to obvious misspellings, like “Modle” and “Moodle”, there’s terms like “fall classes” and “spring classes” that are really just searches for “schedule”. It’s important to combine the right things –  if we combine too many terms, we’re losing an opportunity to provide a more direct link to a resource. But if we combine too few, then our rankings might not be right.

When we’re all done, we can combine the Google searches with the internal searches, which leaves us with 278 different search terms. Here’s the top ten:

Search Term Google Internal Total
staff directory 8569 7832 16401
mylane 14196 1520 15716
moodle 12314 1756 14070
map 7934 5944 13878
testing 4036 6384 10420
library 6326 2928 9254
jobs 6594 2148 8742
nursing 3403 5252 8655
downtown center 5791 292 6083
express lane 2631 3312 5943

Our next step is to look at our actual page views. That’ll let us validate our search traffic, and tell us where our current navigation works. If a page is getting visited a ton, and no one is searching for it, then we did something right… right?

We’ll look at our 500 most popular URLs. Once again, our first step will be to combine them where appropriate, a job made somewhat more difficult since we’ve been switching URLs around as we move into Drupal. We’ll also look out for things that unfairly influence our page counts. For example, some of the computers on campus automatically open to the computer labs landing page – 65% of the page views on that page are “entrances”, meaning it was the first page viewed. To account for this, we’ll subtract the number of entrances, minus the number of times “computer labs” was searched (searches also generate entrances, and we don’t want to discount those). Our page views will now be:

Views = Views – (Entrances – Traffic from Search)

Sadly, that’s a real pain to calculate due to how our data is set up. But we have a pretty good idea of where this is applicable, so I’ll hand calculate it on the half dozen pages where it’s needed.

When we’re done, here’s our 10 most popular pages:

Page Pageviews
/schedule/ 1560548
/collegecatalog/ 196972
/library/ 148587
/explanestaff/ 144550
/calendars/academic.html 112589
/counseling/steps-new-students-enroll-credit-classes 94353
/collegecatalog/career-and-technical-programs 93282
/testing/placementtest.htm 91167
/esfs/admissions 89131
/es/students.html 83761

I’d rather use unique pageviews, to see what pages are important to people, rather than the pages visited most, but unique pageviews are impossible to accurately combine. But we’re really just doing a back of the envelope calculation here, just finding a starting point for our navigation. We’ll perfect it as we look at how people interact with the website after the launch of the new design.

At a quick glance, we see some differences between here and the search data set. But that’s somewhat explained by looking at the pages people go to while applying for admission – the steps to enroll and /esfs/admissions. It seems people don’t search for the application, they search for the institution, then apply. But overall, there’s a good deal of overlap in our two data sets. That’s good – it means our search data is a fairly valid representation of what people look for on our website.

As part of the new design, we’ll be adding landing pages for each of our visitor types. Students, Employees, Future Students, and Community Members will all have a page full of relevant links and information. Since each of those pages will be linked from the homepage, we can create a goal: within two clicks of the homepage you should be able to access all of the pages that account for at least 85% of our page views. Put another way, if you land on the Lane homepage, there should be an 85% chance of getting you where you want to be with only two clicks of the mouse.

In addition to the landing pages, we’ll also have a dedicated Mega Menu on all of our pages on all of our sites. Since there isn’t as much real estate to work with, we can’t have quite as many links. But we’ll also need to use all of the data we’ve collected to build these links with the same goal – the pages people need should be easily accessible.

Unfortunately, now we’ve reached the point where things get a little more subjective.

  • Some of these links aren’t relevant for some of our visitors. Most new students don’t really care about staff instructions for accessing email.
  • There’s still grouping to do. We can’t link to each department, but we can link to a department listing. There’s a couple options for this.
  • Some pages, like guest lecturer information, were only relevant this last year.
  • We need to consider marketing needs. There’s often a program or event that we’re trying to advertise to campus. We cannot ignore this need – it’s how new programs are discovered.
  • There’s some things that aren’t links that need to be added to those pages. One example would be announcements about things like financial aid deadlines. We need to get that information out, but it won’t show up in either of our data sources.

In order to avoid any bias from me, I’ll convene a group of people to dig through this data a bit more and build our links and menu using both the search data and the list of popular pages.. When we’re done, it’ll be time to start testing. Expect updates then!

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:

Visits 4,872,025
Unique Visits 1,420,264
Pages/Visit 2.57
Avg Visit Duration 00:04:00
Bounce Rate 59.06%

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:

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.

2 Big Deployments

We pushed two big sites live today:

Academic and Student Affairs was a monster of a site – some 500 pages. In order to make it manageable, with some help from Tana Stuart over in ASA, we broke it up into a number of smaller sites, and were able to identify some mini sites that could actually be archived – publicly available, but no longer part of the core website. Kassidy Zuniga, an intern at our New Media Center, also updated the look of our archive splash page. Be sure to check out her work!

Depending on how you shuffle the numbers, we’re now at 38% of pages complete, and 57% of departments complete. Many thanks to the friendly folks over at Marketing and Public Relations, who helped us move a stunning 900 pages to the archive (you won’t see anything different yet, but expect a new, streamlined news release format soon!).