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Every couple of months we take a deep look into our Google Analytics numbers and adjust content accordingly, trying to improve tactics bit by bit.
But toward the end of the year, before the holiday crunch, we take a step back to see how those statistics are meeting overall goals versus years prior. Are we reaching a larger, more diverse audience? Are we keeping up with changes in technology? Is our content getting easier to find, and is our site getting easier to navigate?
The numbers below compare November 2010 to November 2011 against November 2008 to November 2009. (Note the gap year…our goal is to identify longer-term changes.)
The good:
- Visits: Up 32% to 114,629
- Homepage visits: Up 796% to 64,248
- Pageviews: Up 16% to 307,460. We take this to be a good sign relative to visits: since our site is informational rather than commercial, we want people to find what they want quickly. Thus…
- Bounce rate (visitors who view only one page): Up 13%
- Average time on site: down 4%
- Our international reach has grown. It’s up 45%. Visits from Asia alone are up 59%.
- Likewise, while small compared to those using English, browsers with their language set to Chinese are up a whopping 84%, making Chinese the second-most used language behind only American English.
Our academics and graduate program pages are behind only the homepage in all visitor categories.
The mixed:
- We’ve seen a small drop-off in people visiting for the first and second time but a modest increase in those visiting three or more times. (We’d really like to know who these people are that have visited cms.mit.edu pages for the 200+th time. There are too many to ascribe it simply to students, faculty, and staff.)
- There’s been a dramatic swing in browser usage, reflecting higher ownership of Macs and a switching from Firefox to Chrome.
- Likewise, visits via mobile devices have exploded: Up more than 4,600% in the last two years.
- Changes in how visitors find us are difficult to account for in meaningful ways. Visits via Facebook are up more than 500%, but in ’08-’09 we used Facebook far less often. We don’t set specific goals as businesses do as to what percentage of visitors should find us via search engines (up 15%) versus typing in our URL (up 26%) versus from sites that link to us (down 18%).
- Keywords (search terms) are important, though. These results are indeed mixed. Our brand recognition efforts have paid dividends, with variations on “mit cms” and “mit comparative media studies” up around 80%. But the more general search “media studies” has brought 20% fewer visitors over the last two years, we assume meaning either there are more such programs or (perhaps and) programs are pushing their marketing harder as well.
Why do we consider these results mixed? While people are finding new ways to access our content, well, they’re finding new ways to access our content. Our site will have to keep up.
The bad:
Frankly, there’s little to be disappointed in…except that our sister site gambit.mit.edu has done so much better. (Just one example: their visits are up 215% since 2008/9, to 506,000 visits in the last year.)
Then again, maybe we’re biased in what statistics we’re showcasing. Do you have specific numbers you’d like to see? Just ask: awhit@mit.edu.
