Traffic Quantity vs. Quality
Last week was spring break here at Wayne State. We had a significant drop in visitors to the main wayne.edu site. Below is the graph in green the previous week while in blue the spring break week. This seemed normal at first glance since less students were on campus to login at the library where wayne.edu is the homepage.
What is interesting is the quantity of visits went up. The basic stats are below, the numbers seem reasonable with a drop in bounce rate, increased time on site and a large percentage of new visitors.
It is probably safe to say current students in the library have a specific task in mind when they get on the computer. Since wayne.edu’s primary audience is prospective students bounce rates are high among current students. It is hard to distinguish if the increase in numbers is from the drop in current students bouncing directly off the site or real prospective students results actually coming through and not washed out by current students.
