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What Are People Looking At On Our Websites? 

All schools’ primary website managers should have received a pdf look at last month’s web stats. From this point on, they’ll be sent on the first of each month from the address [email protected].

Website data can be a very helpful tool. It can help us communicate better with families and students by helping us see what content draws them to our sites. It can help us see trends. It can help us identify trouble spots.

In this edition, we cover:

What Are People Looking At?

Across all our sites, people consistently look the most at:

  • Calendars
  • Staff directories
  • Hours & Bell Schedules
  • Report Absences
  • School News
  • PowerSchool
  • Athletics (secondary sites)
  • Photos (for sites that have a photos page)
  • Lunch menu
  • Teachers’ pages (if your site has them)

What Am I Supposed to Do With This?

Use website analytics to remind yourself that people ARE looking. Glance at what people are paying attention to on your site. Give them more of the kinds of things they're looking at and ensure the most frequently viewed pages are doing their jobs well. 

For example, are calendars popular (YES)? Then add more things to your calendar. Are calendars popular but you still get a lot of questions about events? Add more details to your event description.

Don’t dwell too much on site session/page view numbers. Those will fluctuate over time. They’re most useful to help us see trends: Are our number of visitors and sessions growing year after year or are they on a steady decline throughout the year? 

Looking at trends will also help you identify problems.

  • Do your number of sessions keep dwindling each month? 
    • Likely cause: Your not giving your users a lot of new things to look at or people don’t know your new content is there.
    • Possible solution: Add news stories, update your banner, link to pages on social media or through e-news
  • Are your return visitor numbers slumping? 
    • Possible cause: People aren’t seeing new content that interests them. 
    • Possible solution: Add news stories, calendar items, share links to them on e-news and social media
  • Is your average time on page small (less than 30 seconds) or dwindling?
    • Possible cause: People aren’t finding what they’re looking for
    • Possible solution: Change your page titles/headlines to better reflect the page content, look at 
  • A high number of “Page Not Found”?
    • Likely cause: You have broken links on your site or in a form
    • Solution: Talk with Angela to identify the pages it was on
 Left-hand column:

Pageviews and Sessions chart
: Shows the day-by-day activity on your site. It can help you track if your promotion efforts (like sending links out via e-news) are working.

Most Popular Pages: Helps you see what individual pages of your site are viewed most frequently.

Most popular news articles: Shows views for the top 10 articles on your school news section

Length Users stayed and # of pages per visit: Shows a day-by-day trend of how long people stayed on your site when they visited.

Visitors from social networks: Shows what networks have been sharing links to your sites. It's helpful information if your school has social media accounts. 

Right-hand column:
Sessions: The number of visits to the site. This is different from a page view. One person may visit your site on Monday and look at two pages. That counts as one session, but two pageviews. But if that person looks at one page on Monday and one page on Tuesday, that's two sessions and two page views.

Unique visitors: This is only roughly the number of people who visit your site. Without requiring log-ins, there's no way for us to accurately track the number of people. For example, if one person visits your site on a desktop computer, then visits on their mobile phone, our site counts them as two visitors.

Pages/session: The number of pages a person viewed each time they visited your site. This stat is useful in helping us see if people are finding other parts of our site. Combined with other stats like bounce rate and time on page, it can help us see if people are finding what they're looking for and if they're engaged with our sites.

Avg. Time on page: This helps us see if our content is engaging. Websites with more news content see higher time on page. This data is more helpful when digging into stats of individual pages.

Sessions by user type: Shows us how many of our viewers are coming back for more. If people find our sites useful and we don't have major breaking news, we should see more returning visitors than new visitors.

Where users come from: Shows you how people get to your site. Direct means they had a link directly to a page on your site, such as through a bookmark or typing in your url. 

Sessions by device category: Shows you how many people are using mobile devices to read your site. On most sites, mobile accounts for nearly 40% or more of your views. Mobile views are expected to grow over the next few years. It's a good reminder to ensure your pages work well in mobile view (open a page on a smartphone or make your browser window skinny to check how it may look on a phone).

How Do I See More?

If you or your building admins want to dig into the data, see past months or see this information live, let me know! Tell me:
  • Who wants access
  • Do they want to get the emailed monthly report? Do they also want live access to Google Analytics?  

I’ll add whomever you'd like, and send an email with steps to access and use Google Analytics. If requested, I can also host an online webinar on Google Analytics and help you compare your school’s stats with the averages for elementary or secondary schools.

 

Posted by angela.dice On 12 December, 2016 at 12:08 PM