Site Usage: Dec 2011 - Feb 2012

This update covers December 1st, 2011 to February 29th, 2012 - 90 days. This quarter covers the end of the Fall semester and the start of the Spring semester.



Visitors
We had 11,032 visits from 7,993 unique visitors during this quarter. This total was a 70% increase over the same time period last year. Of these visitors, 43,388 pages were viewed, an average of 3.93 per visit. Mobile devices accounted for 5% of the traffic. Mobile usage is up nearly 400% compared to last year's winter period.

Who visited the site?
Minnesota visitors accounted for about 60% of the total site traffic. 93% of the visits originated in the United States. Only 3.9% of the visited were non-native English speakers. The top 5 visitor states (excluding MN) were Illinois, Wisconsin, California, Texas and New York, which was identical to last quarter. 30% of the visitors were browsing from the University of Minnesota network.



Traffic Sources
This month the traffic split was 28% direct / 56% site referral / 16% search engines. Like last quarter, a large number of referrals arrive from the Campus Facts page on the umn.edu home page. The new homepage for the Office of Planning and Analysis contributed a large number of in-depth (consumed lots of content) visits. 11 Wikipedia articles referenced our enrollment reports, included the Turkish and Finnish language University of Minnesota articles.

Keywords
Over 500 different combinations of search keywords resulted in a visit. The majority of the visits come from a search for "oir", "institutional research", etc, and they generally are recurring visits. The largest gaining keywords were related to "seru", "nsse" and "student debt".

Site Usage: September - November 2011

This update covers September 1st - November 30th, 2011 - 90 days. This quarter featured a few large spikes in traffic due to links in the U of M Brief and 32% increase in visitors as compared to the Summer quarter.



Visitors
We had 12,746 visits from 9,269 unique visitors during this quarter. Of these visitors, 49,972 pages were viewed, an average of 3.92 per visit. The most visits in one day, 430, occurred on October 26th. This was due to a featured article from University Relations which was featured on the weekly Brief newsletter. Mobile devices accounted for 4.1% of the traffic. Mobile usage has increased steadily over the past year, but is still a small segment of the overall visits.



Who Visited the Site?
Over this quarter we received visits from 86 countries and every state in the US . The top 5 visitor countries (excluding the US) were China, Ecuador, India, Canada and Japan. Chinese language speakers were the largest group of non-native English speaking visitors. The top 5 visitor states (excluding MN) were Illinois, Wisconsin, California, Texas and New York. 4,650 of the visits came from the University of Minnesota network.



Traffic Sources
This month the traffic split was 28% direct / 56% site referral / 16% search engines. A large number of referrals arrive from the Campus Facts page on the umn.edu home page. The Facebook and Wikipedia also contributed a notable amount of traffic. Believe it or not, two visitors came from the University of Minnesota Russian language Wikipedia page.

Keywords
687 different combinations of search keywords resulted in a visit. The majority of the visits come from a search for "oir", "institutional research", etc, and they generally are recurring visits. The most new visits came from the keywords "hr" and "university of minnesota enrollment 2011"

Site Usage: June - August 2011

This update covers June 1st - August 31st, 2011 - 91 days. This quarter was marked with an increase in visitors but a decrease in the pages viewed per visit. Over the last quarter the number of visitors increased 35% but the pages per visit decreased 6.5%.



Visitors
We had 9,647 visits from 6,838 unique visitors during this quarter. Of these visitors, 38,035 pages were viewed, an average of 3.94 per visit. The most visits in one day, 190, occurred on July 26th. Mobile devices accounted for only 3.5% of the traffic, but that is up from 1.4% last quarter.



Who Visited the Site?
Over this quarter we received visits from 95 countries and every state in the US . The top 5 visitor countries (excluding the US) were China, India, Canada, Thailand and South Korea. Chinese language speakers were the largest group of non-native English speaking visitors. The top 5 visitor states (excluding MN) were Wisconsin, Illinois, California, Texas and New York. 3,300 of the visits came from the University of Minnesota network. We received visits nearly 300 different University and College campuses.

Content


The enrollment map had a nearly 400% increase in use from 250 views over the last quarter to 1,200 views this quarter.

Traffic Sources
This month the traffic split was 28% direct / 54% site referral / 17% search engines. A large number of referrals arrive from the Campus Facts page on the umn.edu home page. The Chinese Social Networking site renren.com and collegeportraits.org were two other large contributors of traffic. One visitor came from the University of Minnesota Japanese language Wikipedia page.

Keywords
440 different combinations of search keywords resulted in a visit. The overwhelming majority of the visits come from a search for "oir", "institutional research", etc, and they generally are recurring visits. The most new visits came from the keyword "enrollment"

Site Usage: March - May 2011

For the first 6 months after the release, we were doing a monthly usage overview. For the next few months, we will instead do a quarterly update. This update covers March 1st, 2011 to May 31st, 2011. Over this period we have released some improvements to our mapping, some data fixes, been linked in the U of M Brief and have recently been added to the UMN.edu homepage under About the U > Campus Facts. This has opened up our site to a larger audience.



Visitors
We had 7,138 visits from 3,844 unique visitors during this quarter. Of these visitors, 30,111 pages were viewed, an average of 4.2 per visit. The average visitor spent 5 minutes on the site. The most visitors in one day, 181, occurred on May 31st. We were featured in the brief on Wednesday March 2nd, this resulted in about 60 extra visits above the average at that time. Mobile devices accounted for only 1.4% of the traffic, including 35 visits on an iPad.



Who Visited the Site?
Over this quarter we received visits from 54 countries and every state in the US besides West Virginia. The top 5 visitor countries (excluding the US) were Canada, China, Ecuador, India and Thailand. The stop 5 visitor states (excluding MN) were Illinois, Wisconsin, California, Texas and Indiana. 4,000 of the visits came from the University of Minnesota network. We received visits from 191 different University and College campuses. That number includes at least one visit from each of the 12 Big Ten institutions.

Content


Traffic Sources
This month the traffic split was 49% direct / 26% site referral / 25% search engines. As noted before, a large number of referrals arrive from the Campus Facts page on the umn.edu home page. The University of Minnesota Wikipedia page also remains a major referring site.

Keywords
434 different combinations of search keywords resulted in a visit. The overwhelming majority of the visits come from a search for "oir", "institutional research", etc, and they generally are recurring visits. The most new visits came from the keyword "university of minnesota enrollment 2010"

Fun With Staff Searches
66 visits came from people searching for members of our staff. The winners this quarter, in order: Ron Huesman (47!), Krista Soria (8), John Kellog (6).

Site Usage - Month of February

February is the shortest month, but it set the new high water mark for monthly visits and page views. The reasons behind this seems to be the promoting of the SERU survey reports and publications and the NSSE Survey email reminder containing a link back to our site.

Visitors
We had 2,472 visits from 1,520 unique visitors during the month. Of these visitors, 10,261 pages were viewed, an average of 4.2 per visit. The average visitor spent 5 minutes on the site. The most visitors in one day, 286, occurred on February 10th, which was the day the NSSE survey email was distributed. The most page views, 794, occurred on Feb 9th, during which our SERU reports were linked in a High Ed email list. It's interesting to note that although the NSSE email resulted in a much larger raw number of visits, any link to the SERU survey report resulted in a higher quality visit. Meaning the user actually viewed more than just the page they were linked to and did not immediatly exit the site.



This month we received a visit from every Big Ten University campus network, including the newest member University of Nebraska, Lincoln, besides Northwestern University. In general, the majority of our visits come from the U of M system, the majority of the non-UMN traffic is from other University campuses throughout the nation, and occasionally internationally.



Content
42.% of users who visited the home page ended up looking some sort of Student data. As has been the theme, the biggest changes for content this month has been the survey data, of which the NSSE page and the SERU page and reports had a large gain in views.

The mosted viewed SERU Survey item was the Sense of Belonging question, which a student notes their sense of belonging at the U of M campus.

Miscellanea: Exit% measures when a vistor "leaves" the site. The NSSE and College Portrait page have over 75% of visitors leave the site after viewing the page, while the Enrollment page only has 6% of visitor leave. This is most likely due to the nature of the pages, but interesting nonetheless.

Traffic Sources
This month the traffic split was 56% direct / 23% site referral / 21% search engines. The increase in direct traffic is a red herring as unfortunately the tracking software did not correctly count clicks from emailed links in as a referral. The same can be said for the increase in referral, as a user needs to exit the page to authenticate, which is required for the SERU reports, and then re-enter, so that is counted as a referral.

Top Referring Site
Wikipedia and the U of M Library site were again the big winners when it comes to referral.

Site Usage - Month of January

January marked our highest site traffic month since we have released, a lot of this was due to increased traffic to our publications and surveys page.

Visitors
We had 2,226 visits from 1,184 unique visitors during the month. Of these visitors, 8,929 pages were viewed, an average of 4.01 per visit. The average visitor spent 5 minutes on the site. The most visitors in one day (132) occurred on Tuesday, Jan 25th, however, the most page views (684) occurred on Wed, Jan 26th. We received visitors from 45 cities in Minnesota. In order of visits: Minneapolis, St Paul, Duluth, Circle Pines, Crookston and Rochester. 5 of those 6 cities contain a U of M campus.



Visitors by Browser: 48%, Firefox / 38%, Internet Explorer / 6.5%, Safari, 5.8% Chrome

Number of Visits by State: 1,709, Minnesota / 61, Illinois / 35, California/ 27 Nebraska

42 users visited the site via a mobile device (iPad, Cell Phone, etc).

Content
32.6% of users who visited the home page ended up looking some sort of Student data. The biggest gain came for the HR Employee Count page, which accounted for 6.7% of clicks on the home page.

Most Viewed Enrollment Reports: 18.6%, Academic Level / 7.6% Race/Ethnicity

Most Viewed Freshman Characteristics Report: 11%, ACT Composite / 9% Home Location

Miscellanea: 392 visitors viewed at least five pages. Besides the Home Page, the College Portrait page received the most direct landing visits, meaning the visitor did not click another link on our site to get to that page.

Traffic Sources
This month the traffic split was 52.5% direct / 15% site referral / 32% search engines.

Top Referring Site
en.wikipedia.org
lib.umn.edu

Site Usage - December and 2010 Review

This marks the end of December, and of 2010. Our re-built site has now been live for four months. December marked the first month we have started tracking file downloads. Usage was down because of the University-wide furlough and holiday vacation.

Visitors
We had 1,771 visits from 964 unique visitors during the month. Of these visitors, 7,865 pages were viewed, an average of 4.4 per visit. The average visitor spent 5 minutes and 31 seconds on the site. The most visitors in one day (118) occurred on Tues, Dec 7th, however, the most page views (695) occurred on Mon, Dec 13th. Visitors came from 43 of the 50 states and the district of Columbia. After Minnesota, the most visits came from Illinois, Texas, Wisconsin, Michigan and California.

Visitors by Browser: 52%, Firefox / 36%, Internet Explorer / 6%, Safari, 6% Chrome

25 users visited the site via a mobile device (Android, iPhone, etc).

Content
40% of users who visited the home page ended up looking some sort of Student data, 20% at the Official Enrollment Statistics.

Most Viewed Enrollment Reports: 18.1%, Academic Level. The new "View All" report for one term received 6% of the reporting traffic.

Most Viewed Freshman Characteristics Report: 12.4%, ACT Composite / 12.4% High School Rank

Most Downloaded Files: Fall 2009 Retention Report, 2010 Employee and Student Headcounts by Department, 2009-10 Common Data Set.

Miscellanea: The newly released Student Aid Profile and Human Resource Count Data received 115 and 114 views respectively.

Traffic Sources
In November, the traffic split was 59% direct / 21% site referral / 19% search engines. This month

Top Search Terms (Search Engine(Total Vists): # of visits, search term)
UMN Search (272): 65, institutional research, 39, NSSE, 35, Metrics
Google (156):35, huesman stebleton immigrant, 9, institutional research

Top Referring Site (Non-UMN)
en.wikipedia.org: 60 visits

2010 Summary
From Sept 15th-Dec 31st we received 6,500+ visits from over 3,200 unique visitors. The heaviest traffic came on October 18th, when we released the 2010 Official Enrollment Statistics. We received just under 30,000 page views.

Staff, faculty and students from more than 200 Universities and Colleges around the world visited the site.

Student data accounted for more than 1 out of every 2 page views.

We received visits from 53 countries, including Japan, China, and France. In the United States, we received visitors from every state in the union except Wyoming.

Site Usage - Month of November

This marks the end of the third month live, and the second full month (we released in mid-September).

Visitors
We had 1,824 visits from 997 unique visitors during the month. Of these visitors, 7,210 pages were viewed, an average of 3.95 per visit. The average visitor spent 3 minutes and 36 seconds on the site. The most visitors in one day (98) occurred on Monday, Nov 8th, however, the most page views (509) occurred on Tuesday, Oct 9th. We received visitors 21 countries around the world, including the UK, Japan, UAE and Russia.



Visitors by Browser: 52%, Firefox / 35%, Internet Explorer / 7.4%, Safari, 5.7% Chrome

Number of Visits by State: 1,376, Minnesota / 42, Illinois / 37, Texas / 36 Wisconsin

25 users visited the site via a mobile device (iPad, Cell Phone, etc).

Content
44% of users who visited the home page ended up looking some sort of Student data, 21% at the Official Enrollment Statistics.

Most Viewed Enrollment Reports: 27.6%, Academic Level / 7% FT/PT Status

Most Viewed Freshman Characteristics Report: 14%, ACT Composite / 9.6% High School Rank

Miscellanea: The Staff page was viewed 296 times. 320 visitors viewed at least five pages. 22% of visitors have browsed to the page over 50 times this month.

Traffic Sources
In October the traffic split was 66% direct / 18% site referral / 16% search engines. This month the traffic split was 59% direct / 21% site referral / 19% search engines, a 6% gain in discovered as opposed to direct.

Top Search Terms (Search Engine(Total Vists): # of visits, search term)
UMN Search (206): 84, institutional research, 44 NSSE
Google (122): 8, nsse university minnesota, 10 university of minnesota enrollment 2010

Top Referring Site (Non-UMN)
en.wikipedia.org: 58 visits

These links were coming from the U of M wikipedia page, for the cited enrollment numbers.

Tracking File Downloads w/Google Analytics

The November 19th, 2010 Web Standards Meeting featured a presentation on utilizing Analytics, specifically Google Analytics, to enhance your user experience and website usage. This presentation was provided by Nuria Sheehan, CEHD, and Liz Turchin, CCE. Nuria had specifically mentioned something about capturing click events to track PDF file downloads. This is a segment of usage data that we had previously missed, as I have not used Apache log analysis, so I decided to investigate further...

Some Google searching revealed a snippet of JavaScript which would in effect, simulate a standard click via an onclick action. The snippet follows:

onClick="javascript: pageTracker._trackPageview('/downloads/map');

There is an obvious limitation to implementing this solution: you have to manually add an onClick attribute to your links. [More details to this regard on Google Help](http://www.google.com/support/analytics/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=55529)

I wanted a solution that would automatically register and track these clicks, without me having to maintain all of the links to these PDFs, Excel documents, etc. Luckily for me, I utilize the [Prototype](http://www.prototypejs.org/) JavaScript framework, which provides many shortcuts to make something like this quite easy.

The end product needed to search the DOM to identify links to PDF and Excel documents and register a click event listener, which would then use the built-in callback function from Google, shown above. Code follows:

*This code should be in an application wide JavaScript file, or in the page's HTML header, after the Prototype file is included.*

// Finds all of the PDF/XLS document links on a page, and enables
// tracking for Google analytics. Known issue, will fail to match
// PDF links utilizing hash to jump to page (eg file.pdf#page=35).
// Also, not compatible with IE6 because of CSS 3.
// More info on the page tracking API:
// http://www.google.com/support/analytics/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=55529
function trackFileClicks(){
// Modify file_extensions to include any additional types you
// would like to track (eg .xlsx)
var file_exentions = ['.pdf', '.xls', '.doc'];
file_exentions.each(function(file_extension){
// CSS 3 selector, a[href$='.pdf'], $= implies file ends with '.pdf'
var css_selector = "a[href$='" + file_extension + "']";
// select all of the links w/the current file extension
$$(css_selector).each(function(link){
// Add a click listener to the link, which will send an
// Asynch request to google
link.observe('click', function(e){
var pageTracker = _gat._getTracker('UA-XXXXXX'); //Change to your ID
pageTracker._trackPageview(cleanHref(link.href, file_extension));
});
});
});
}

// Takes the full URL and reduces to only path, and file name sans extension.
function cleanHref(href, extension){
// Found RE on StackOverflow:
// http://stackoverflow.com/questions/27745/getting-parts-of-a-url-regex)
var uri_regex = /^((http[s]?|ftp):\/)?\/?([^:\/\s]+)(:([^\/]*))?((\/\w+)*\/)
([\w\-\.]+[^#?\s]+)(\?([^#]*))?(#(.*))?$/;
var clean_href = href.toString();
//Regex returns array with indexes as follows:
var SCHEMA = 2, DOMAIN = 3, PORT = 5, PATH = 6,
FILE = 8, QUERYSTRING = 9, HASH = 12;
var match_container = clean_href.match(uri_regex)

return match_container[PATH] + match_container[FILE].replace(extension, '');
}

*This code must be on the Header of your page and wrapped with script tags*

document.observe("dom:loaded", function() {
trackFileClicks();
}

If you are using another library like jQuery, it should be quite easy to port this code over. It is important to note that since this utilizes CSS3, a browser which does not support this, eg IE6, will fail. The code could be extended, but you would lose some speed, as you would be required to manually check all of the links via Regex.

**UPDATE**: var pageTracker = _gat._getTracker('UA-XXXXXX'); //Change to your ID This line must be included, intial blog post was missing this, and therefore if the code was used, clicks would not be tracked.

This has been implemented on our site, and has been proven successful! The fix above was required to make it work.

Site Usage - Month of October

This marks the end of the second month live. The big releases that occurred in October were the release of the Fall 2010 Enrollment and Freshman Characteristics data, the Enrollment maps Google mash-up, and the Degrees and Certificates Awarded 2010 data. For who are wondering, the usage data is collected and analyzed via Google Analytics.

Visitors
We had 1,994 visits from 1,094 unique visitors during the month. Of these visitors, 9,926 pages were viewed, an average of 4.98 per visit. The average visitor spent 4 minutes and 22 seconds on the site. The most visitors in one day (127) occurred on Monday, Oct 18th, however, the most page views (1,064) occurred on Thursday, Oct 14th. We received visitors from 40 of the 50 states in the United States.



Visitors by Browser: 49.6%, Firefox / 36.3%, Internet Explorer / 7.2%, Safari, 6.5% Chrome

Number of Visits by State: 1,567, Minnesota / 43, California / 33, Illinois / 29 Wisconsin

26 users visited the site via a mobile device (iPad, Cell Phone, etc).

Content
50% of users who visited the home page ended up looking some sort of Student data, 28% at the Official Enrollment Statistics. The Fall 2010 Enrollment statistics were viewed 969 times, and 85% of those visits resulted in the viewing of at least one report.

Most Viewed Enrollment Reports: 18.8%, Academic Level / 11.6% Registration Status

Most Viewed Freshman Characteristics Report: 14%, ACT Composite / 11% High School Rank

The Fall Enrollment Map was viewed 118 times.

Traffic Sources
Last month, 85% of people browsed directly to www.oir.umn.edu. As anticipated, this number was reduced, and the number of referrals and searches increased. This month the traffic split was 66% direct / 18% site referral / 16% search engines.

Top Search Terms (Search Engine(Total Vists): # of visits, search term)
UMN Search (174): 39, institutional research, 32 oir
Google (119): 11, nsse university minnesota, 10 university of minnesota tuition history

Site Usage - Month of September

Our first "month" live has ended. Since the site launched on September 16th, we have a slightly small data set, but we still have enough data to have some fun with numbers! Enjoy a glance into our site usage...

Visitors
We had exactly 1,000 visits from 579 unique visitors during the month. Of these visitors, 4,279 pages were viewed, an average of 4.29 per visit. The average visitor spent 2 minutes and 55 seconds on the site. The most visitors in one day (92) occurred on Monday, Sept 20th, however, the most page views (544) occurred on Tuesday, Sept 21st. 20% of our visitors have visited the site at least 9 times.

Visitors by Browser: 50.8%, Firefox / 34.9%, Internet Explorer / 7.9%, Safari

Number of Visits by State: 773, Minnesota / 25, Illinois / 15, Texas, Indiana

17 users visited the site via a mobile device (iPad, Cell Phone, etc).

Content
52% of users who visited the home page ended up looking some sort of Student data, 24% at the Official Enrollment Statistics.

Most Viewed Enrollment Reports: 20.3%, Academic Level / 7%, Race/Ethnicity

Most Viewed Freshman Characteristics Report: 14%, ACT Composite / 11% High School Rank

Most Viewed Degrees Awarded Report: 36%, Degrees by College/Major

Traffic Sources
85% of people browsed directly to www.oir.umn.edu. This will likely drop as our site becomes indexed and (hopefully) more highly ranked in search engine results. We have received a small number of hits from Google and Bing, but expect more based on past data.