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).

Dimensional Enrollment Data

We have recently release a tool that allows one to create a custom pivot table for our enrollment data. This allows each of the nine dimensions, Term, Campus, College, Level, Class, Ethnic Group, Gender, FT/PT Status and Registration Status to be shown in many different ways, at the same time, on a table. This can answer common multi-dimensional questions our Official Enrollment reports cannot, for example, viewing the enrollment Gender by Ethnicity.

How this works
Under our student data page, you will see the link to the Fall Student Enrollment Pivot Reports. That link will bring you to the index page. We have provided two commonly asked reports, Gender over Ethnicity by Term, Campus, College and Ethnicity over Registration Status by Term, Campus, College, Level. On the right, you see a link to Build your own table..., this will bring you to the tool. Once there, you are able to drag and drop the dimensions to appear as a filter, column header or appear per row.

The first release of this tool used an older JavaScript library, so the drag and drop functionality was inconsistent and quirky. The old library has been replaced by the latest industry standard and should behave consistently across browsers and platforms. Mobile users will have to use the pre-build reports as the drag and drop functionality does not work on a non-traditional browser.

How do I see "All Campuses" or "All College" for a campus?
In this case, you would simply exclude the Dimension for which you want to see "All". For example, to see All Campuses enrollment by Gender and Ethnicity, pick "Term" for a filter, "Gender" for the column and "Ethnic Group" for the rows.

How does the drag and drop interface work?
A demonstration video is provided on the report page. The demo is based on the non-upgraded drag and drop framework for the HR Headcount reports, but the remains mostly relevant.

Mapping Student Data

On May 11th, we released a new version of our enrollment map and a map showing our students studying abroad. This release was developed because we purchased a mapping package from the provider of our charting package to replace Google maps. The big change this mapping software allowed was easily rendering Minnesota Counties, intensity mapping based upon numeric input and easy mouse-over popup showing data per location (e.g. How many students come from Hennepin county). The end result was a more usable map.

Enrollment Mapped by Home Location
Not only did the mapping tool change for this report, but we also changed how we report the data. Since the Minnesota county data was always skewed towards the largest counties, we decided to normalize the data by finding the ratio of students per total residents in each location. Since our enrollment varies by year, we utilized the census estimiates site to find the estimated population of each county, state and country per year, to match. The end result shows the impact of each institution on the local community as opposed to the raw numbers.

Twin Cities - Fall 2010 Enrollment

Duluth - Fall 2010 Enrollment

Morris - Fall 2010 Enrollment

As you can see in the images above, the coordinate counties near the coordinate campuses are impacted more strongly that the metro area, while the Twin Cities students impacts the metro area. Without normalizing the data, Hennepin and Ramsey county dominate the maps, as they are the two largest counties in the state, containing almost 2/5 of the state population.

University of Minnesota: Students Studying Abroad
This map below shows the number of University students participating in study programs in each country for a given Academic Year and Campus. Since we aren't as concerned about the population, the intensity map shows the raw data.

Twin Cities - Students Abroad 2009-10

Site Update 5/11/2011

This morning we have released two new reports and enhanced the functionality of two reports.

New Reports
Fall Student Enrollment Pivot Reports: This tool brings the drag and drop functionality and ability to cross variables to the enrollment data. We have released the past three Fall terms, but for the next term, we will release the previous five Fall enrollment numbers on the tool, Fall 2007-Fall 2011. This release is coupled with an improvement to the drag and drop interface.

Students Studying Abroad: This report using the DW Education Abroad system to show the number of University students participating in study programs in each country for a given Academic Year and Campus.

Enhanced Reports
Fall Enrollment Map: The Enrollment data is now split into county, state and country level intensity maps, as well as normalized by the population of the counties.

HR Employee Count: The improvements made to the drag and drop interface for the Fall Enrollment also applies to the HR Employee count reports.

A detailed explanation of each of the reports will be released in the coming weeks.

Fall 2010 End of Term Official Enrollment File

There is currently an error in the Fall 2010 End of Term Official Registration Statistics file
(PS_DWSA_STIX_1109) where 594 records have REG_STA values of 'Readmit', when they should be 'Continuing'. These errors will be fixed later this week. Please contact OIR if you have any questions about this.

Service Outage Sunday (4/4/11)

Our web server was down for most of the day yesterday, Sunday April 4th, 2011. This was due to an error with the Office of Information Technologies (OIT) virtual server hosting. Apologize if anyone had trouble due to this issue, it has been resolved and OIT is doing what it can to ensure it will not happen again.

Enrollment Data: Fall 2010 Registration Status Fixed

The 552 records which had the incorrect registration status were updated on the Data Warehouse and in our web reports. The only term affected was Fall 2010. We also used this opportunity to update the Humphrey Inst of Public Affairs to the Humphrey Schl of Public Affairs on all of our web based reports.

Please contact our staff if you have questions or concerns about the updated data.