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 - 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.