Statistics

136 separate calendars
30,804 total events among all sites
42,922 event occurrences (regular + recurring)
2,849 events emailed to friends

71% of events are recurring
41% of events are in the Student Center

14 events added per day on average (including weekends)

Most Used Calendars
6681 events by Student Center
823 events by Dean of Students Office
545 events by College of Fine, Performing and Communication Arts

First Event
CULMA’s  Open House and Annual Reception August 31, 2004

Most Recent Event
MAME Annual Conference October 21, 2009

Most Recent Recurring Event
11th Annual Career Evening January 7, 2011

Date with the most events
94 Events – September 8, 2008

Stats from June 15 – July 15, 2009

Top Pages

Of course the homepage is our most hit page but the second surprised me. I thought the future students would be #2 but probably because we are well into the semester current students are an overwhelming majority. Also these numbers were pulled from internal and external audiences.

Referring Sites

A majority of our traffic comes direct, to me this is not that odd since this data set is from both internal and external audiences, most computers on campus have wayne.edu set to their homepage. I could be totally wrong about that but there is no way to test direct traffic. Search engines rank high over all, especially Google since we use that for internal site searches. Student voice is an interesting one, in the last few months the Dean of Students has been sending out surveys and they all forward back to wayne.edu, forcing a lot of traffic to our homepage.

Top Browsers

Internet Explorer is still a large majority of our traffic. Although the computers in the libraries all have Firefox, some students still click on that blue E out of habit (I have just sat in the library and watched behaviors before).

Out of the Internet Explorer visits, here’s how it breaks down. These visit percentages are out of the 70.5% IE usage, not out of the total visits. Unfortunately IE6 still accounts for ~20% of our total traffic.

Operating Systems

Windows is still the clear winner in the OS category although Macintosh has been gaining. It is interesting to note that the iPhone and iPod account for almost 0.7% of our web traffic, more than double the Linux traffic. Adding up all the mobile devices it accounts for ~1% total traffic, it might not seem like a lot now but that number has been growing fast!

Overall nothing super surprising with the numbers, they are general stats so nothing to in depth with campaigns or targeted paths. The two large trends I wanted to point out where the decrease but still not present IE6 usage and the upward trend of mobile browsing.

“Schools & Colleges” vs ”Academic Programs”

We are ever changing and refining the navigation for wayne.edu and over the past year of so many more universities have been changing their wording from “Schools & Colleges” to “Academic Programs”. That got us wondering, we thought academic programs had a more concise description of what is on the page behind the link. So we decided to try it out.

Technical Results

May 21 – June 15, 2009 (3 weeks)
126,433 Page Visitors
20,644 Conversions
16.33% Conversion Rate

Why was there no clear winner?

Two reason’s why I think no winner was found. The first is an issue on our end, we displayed the test for everyone, internal and external computers. Typically on campus staff/faculty have wayne.edu set as their homepage, they know the site and what they need to get to. Regardless what the link is called they will click it, this throws off the results since they are not our primary audience and they are not actually thinking about the click they are making.

The second is that someone looking for our list of programs has really only one route to get to it from wayne.edu and that is this link. It might take someone longer to figure out “Schools & Colleges” will give them a list of our programs but they still got there. They are adapting to our wording instead of ignoring our wording and using another method to find the information they need. I even wonder if we changed it to “What we offer” we would still get people clicking on it because they have a specific task in mind already.

We ended up just keeping Schools & Colleges for now

The thought is since there was no real winner although we love academic programs better we cannot justify the change. The university community has been voicestrous about any changes to wayne.edu and we want to make sure we have some real numbers to backup a navigation change.

Frankly the homepage navigation is not where we want it to be at all. It’s these types of tests that get us in the right direction on purpose instead of on a whim.

We are going to run another test on an unknown date for an unknown time with the lessons we learned from this test. Sorry we can’t tell you more but I am sure we will write about it afterward.

I was one of the applicants and wrote my post on Tracking Flash Interaction with Google Analytics. The goal was to not only give the readers an enjoyable article but also real tools that can be used on their site for free and back that up with an actual example.

So we only have one week to vote, below I have the link to all the guest posts and the link to vote. All the applicants did a great job! I encourage everyone to read all the articles and vote for who you think should be the next .eduGuru blogger.

Read All Guest Posts

Vote For Your Favorite

Voting closes Midnight Saturday November 29th.

Our Method

We used a modified version of the SocialHistory JS created by Aza Raskin. The technique is pretty straight forward by creating an iframe and using the CSS a:visited to see if you have visited a site before or not.

Sites we looked for

Digg, Reddit, StumbleUpon, Yahoo Buzz, Facebook, Del.icio.us, MySpace, Technorati, Twitter, After5, MetroMode, Newsvine, Songza, Slashdot, Ma.gnolia, Blinklist, Furl, Mister Wong, Current, Menaeme, Oknotizie, Diigo, Funp, Blogmarks, Yahoo Bookmarks, Xanga, Blogger, LiveJournal, Last.fm, N4G, Faves”, Simpy, Yigg, Kirtsy, Fark, Mixx, Orkut, Upcoming.org, Google Bookmarks

Frankly some of those I had never even heard about but we tested for them any way.

Results

The first two graphs are percentages of all the users who visited the homepage. The rest of the graphs are only percentages of the users who visited one or more social networks before coming to wayne.edu.

In total the homepage was hit 25,927 times over the course of the weekend (due to an unexpected issue we did not track early Sunday morning from midnight to 5am), of those 15,600 had visited at least one social network before coming to wayne.edu

Internal v. External Users

Our usual percentage is closer to 50/50 since all the computers in the libraries open to wayne.edu.

No Social Network Users v. Social Network Users

Number of Networks per User

Popular Social Networks

Top Network Combinations

Ending Thoughts

Although these results are not 100% fool proof since the method we used is not a gaurentee usage of a site but just a visit to a site and it tracks mainly the sites homepage and login page. Some users may be using 3rd party applications primarily to interact with a site (Twitter for examle). We had a suspicion Facebook and MySpace would be most popular, we just didnt know which one would come out on top. It is pretty clear Facebook is the winner with MySpace coming in second, no other site stood up to those two. Having this concrete evidence was crucial for us to make future decisions based on what communities our prospective students are part of.