State of the website: February 2011 March 3, 2011
Posted by davidjdahl in Assessment, State of the website.Tags: analytics, usage statistics
trackback
This is the first in a series of monthly posts giving an overview of how our website is being used. (Site statistics are tracked using Google Analytics, except for the mobile website, which uses PercentMobile.) And now for the results…
Overall Numbers
| Pageviews | 353,953 |
| Visits | 100,340 |
| Pages per visit | 3.53 |
| Average time on site | 4:06 |
| Busiest day | Monday, February 28, 2011 (6,512 visits) |
| Busiest hour of the day | Noon (5,835 visits) |
Visitor Profile
Here’s a little information about the 56,020 unique visitors who used our website during February.
Browser overview
Distribution of browsers used on the Library's website during February 2011
Connection speed: Most users (63.5%) use our website via a T1 connection. Less than 1% access the website with a dial-up connection.
Most visitors come from…
- Country: United States (99.52%)
- State: Maryland (95.99%)
- City: Towson (81.67%)
While the majority of visits do come from within the United States, the library website has been accessed 477 times from 70 countries during February.
Content overview
Most accessed pages
| Research Databases | 18,072 pageviews |
| Journal List | 12,859 pageviews |
| Citing Sources | 8,125 pageviews |
| Off-campus Login | 8,046 pageviews |
| Subject Gateways | 6,648 pageviews |
Most used databases
| Academic Search Premier | accessed 1,486 times |
| LexisNexis Academic | accessed 1,417 times |
| CINAHL | accessed 1,348 times |
| Business Source Complete | accessed 1,095 times |
| JStor | accessed 1,030 times |
Mobile Website Overview
The Library also maintains a version of the website that is optimized for mobile devices. Below are some statistics about its usage.
| Pageviews | 1,084 |
| Visits | 555 |
| Pages per visit | 1.9 |
Mobile Device analysis
A listing of the top 10 mobile devices used to access the library's mobile website, displaying the total number of visits for each device.
Almost 53% of visits to the Library’s mobile website came from an Apple product using the iPhone operating system (OS). This was followed by devices with the Android OS (30.5%) and the Blackberry OS (10.3%).
Top mobile pages
| Library Hours | 207 |
| Phone numbers | 76 |
| Research Tools | 57 |
| What’s Where | 35 |
| Directions | 29 |
What We’re Doing
Right now the buzzword is ‘mobile’. The Library has had a mobile website available for quite some time now, but we’re looking to expand the services we offer via mobile devices as well as the quality of your library experience on your mobile device. If you’ve used your phone recently to access the Library’s website, you may have noticed that we “magically” redirect you to our mobile website. This is because we’ve added some code to the website to determine if you’re using a mobile device. Anytime you visit a site, your device/browser sends information to the website that we can use to distinguish a desktop computer from a cell phone. Well, sometimes some users are redirected to the mobile site by mistake (based on the info the website gets from their device). Through recent diligent attention to the traffic going to our mobile site, we’ve been able to catch many of these false redirects. Comparing the first week of the month to the last week, we’ve increased our accuracy from 78% to 96% (pretty good!). We’ll keep watching the logs and updating our code to make sure we send you to the correct place!
In other web news, Special Collections is undergoing a redesign of their web space. Special Collections has a lot of great historical resources and information about the University and the region; the new site will be designed to make these resources more accessible to everyone. Look for the redesigned site to be available by the end of March.
A preview of the new home page for Special Collections.
Very useful stats, nice format and explanations.