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.

Released: Financial Aid Reports - All Undergraduates

The Office of Institutional Research (OIR) has a new student financial aid report. This new report includes admission and financial aid data for all undergraduate students (degree seeking and non-degree seeking, full and part time) by campus. The reports are by aid year which includes three terms (fall, spring, and summer) and starts with data from Fall 1999. Currently, there are eleven aid years of data available.

Admissions related data includes the number of new student (freshmen and transfer) that have applied, been admitted, and enrolled for an entire aid year (fall, spring, and summer terms).

Financial aid related data includes the number of students receiving aid, PELL Grants, and University Scholarships. Average aid amounts for the year by category is also included. Federal cost of attendance information for new freshmen that are Minnesota residents is also available.

The new reports also include average loan debt amount broken down by Minnesota residents and Non-Minnesota residents. The amount is calculated for those students that graduated during the report aid year. The average loan debt amount is further broken out to include and exclude PLUS (parent) loans. The loan amounts are those processed and captured in the University of Minnesota student systems, and would not include personal loans made by the student or parent. Average Loan Debts are not available prior to Fall 2003.

Special thanks to all the folks in the Office of Student Finance for their help on this new report.

The report can be found here.

Released: 2010-2011 Common Data Set

The 2010-2011 Common Data Set file is now available for download. Staff member Andrea Galliger has provided a short description of the file:

The Common Data Set (CDS) is a set of information whose content and definitons are agreed upon by data providers in the higher education community as well as publishers represented by the College Board, Peterson's, and U.S. News & World Report. These efforts are aimed at reducing the reporting burden on data providers while improving the accuracy of the information provided. An updated Common Data Set is produced once each academic year.

For more details, visit the Common Data Set Initiative web site:

http://www.commondataset.org/

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.

Released: HR Employee Count Tool and Student Aid Profile

HR Headcount Tool
The next iteration of our web-based reports has been released. This time the Human Resource Employee Headcount PDF was the subject of the conversion. These reports offer more flexibility than the student data in terms of presentation. We have three pre-built reports, one of which is based on the PDF as well as a tool which allows users to drag and drop dimensions to view that data to their liking, based on the concept of an Excel pivot table.

View the web-based HR Employee Headcount reports.

Student Aid Profile
We have released a new report regarding student financial aid. Some of the data included: PELL grants, work study, and loans. This data can be found on the Student Data page, under Student Aid Profile, and is available for the past two years.

More details on both of these will be coming in the next few weeks.

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.

Student Data Enhancements

System-wide Totals
The enrollment reports now show a University of Minnesota System-wide total when viewing the Headcount Data (the reports on the left-hand column which show one term of data). This had been requested for those who work on a system level. Previously, one would have been required to add up each of the Campus totals to get the system total.



"All on one page" report
One change a few people had requested was the ability to see all of the dimensions we made available in the Headcount reports available on one page, so it could be printed. We have added the ability to do just this. If you would like to utilize this, find the link on the bottom of the left-hand column which says "All of the above on one page".



Data to Fall 2000/Fall 2001
The Official Student Enrollment data and the New Freshman Characteristics data had been limited to Fall 2005 due to limits of our trend data. We have now opened up the one-term reports for all the available terms (Fall 2000 for Enrollment, Fall 2001 for Freshman Characteristics).