State of the Website: March 2011 April 5, 2011
Posted by davidjdahl in Assessment, State of the website.Tags: analytics, usage statistics
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March. They say “in like a lion out like a lamb” and vice versa, but for library websites, March is all lion all the time. With midterms and research paper deadlines, the Library’s website gets a lot of use during March – even with Spring Break thrown in there! Below are some usage statistics for the month.
Overall Numbers
| Pageviews | 396,700 |
| Visits | 121,612 |
| Pages per visit | 3.26 |
| Average time on site | 3:34 |
| Busiest day | Monday, March 7, 2011 (6,483 visits) |
| Busiest hour of the day | Noon (6,797 visits) |
Visitor Profile
Here’s a little information about the 62,207 unique visitors who used our website during March.
Browser overview
Nearly 67% of our visitors use Internet Explorer (IE) when viewing our website. Below is a breakdown of the various versions of IE that are used. If you’re not on IE 8.0 yet, it’s probably time to upgrade!
Distribution of visitors using different versions of Internet Explorer
Most visitors come from…
- Country: United States (99.5%)
- State: Maryland (95.67%)
- City: Towson (79.21%)
Over 600 visits came from 71 other countries.
Content overview
Most accessed pages
| Research Databases | 20,827 pageviews |
| Journal List | 13,393 pageviews |
| Off-campus Login | 10,248 pageviews |
| Citing Source | 9,997 pageviews |
| Subject Gateways | 7,289 pageviews |
Most used databases
| Academic Search Premier | accessed 2,334 times |
| Business Source Complete | accessed 1,551 times |
| LexisNexis | accessed 1,533 times |
| CINAHL | accessed 1,427 times |
| JStor | accessed 1,291 times |
These are all great databases, but the Library has many more. Be sure to take a look at the Library’s Subject Gateways to find more databases in your subject area.
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 | 1,140 |
| Visits | 674 |
| Pages per visit | 1.7 |
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.
The distribution of operating systems used to access the Library’s mobile website did not change significantly. Of all visits, 54.2% came from an Apple product using the iPhone operating system (OS). This was followed by devices with the Android OS (29.7%) and the Blackberry OS (10.2%).
Top mobile pages
| Library Hours | 283 |
| Phone numbers | 64 |
| Research Tools | 59 |
| Mobile Catalog | 40 |
| What’s Where | 35 |
What We’re Doing
As mentioned in the February report, the Library has been working on a new web presence for Special Collections and Archives (http://cooklibrary.towson.edu/spcoll). The site was launched on March 22nd and received over 800 views during the remainder of the month! Special Collections also launched a Facebook page (http://www.facebook.com/tuspcoll) to help you keep up on the department’s projects, as well as some interesting artifacts and tidbits of information they find along the way.
For the Library’s mobile site, we’ve stopped redirecting iPad users to it. While the iPad is a mobile device, the web browsing experience is good enough that it’s easy to use the Library website just as if you were on a desktop. If you’re an iPad user and prefer the mobile site, you can still access it directly at http://cooklibrary.towson.edu/m.
Some of the data on the Library website is brought in from other applications. (For instance, our hours/events information is stored in Google Calendar.) This allows us to provide up-to-date information without a lot of manual labor. This works well most of the time, but occasionally those other applications don’t load properly, which can cause big problems. We’ve added error handling code to catch these errors that prevent the website from loading properly.
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