UTLC Website Traffic Report

The data collected below covers a 30-day period from March 1 to March 31 2020.


Most Visited Pages

The table above shows the 25 most popular pages over the past month. Pageviews count the number of visits to each page, while unique pageviews counts how many ‘new’ visitors each page saw. We can see the TIO’s Live! With Zoom page was the big hit of the month with more unique visitors than any other page (in fact, it has a second entry lower in the list to boost the numbers even more). As the entire campus shifts to a remote learning environment, this page became a crucial resource while instructors looked for help setting up their new virutal classroom.

Because faculty spent a fair amount of time talking with the TIO and ITS participants, this page also saw one of the highest average visit times. It was surpassed only by VirtualExpo, the location of the new Virtual Undergraduate Research Expo hosted by URSCO. As this page is under construction, it’ll have higher visit times as content is put into place.

4 of the top 7 pages were Residential College Student pages, and the RCO application page ranked 10th in unique visitors. Combined with our age demographic information at the bottom of this report, we can see students and parents may be  visiting these pages to get info about the upcoming year.

% Exit highlights how many people left the site from a page, indicating this page was the terminal spot for their journey through our site. Higher percentages suggest visitors were able to find the info they needed on this page; lower values indicate the visitor continued surfing the site after viewing a particular page. We generally want to see high percentages with high visit counts as this suggests visitors are coming to our site for specific content and finding it quickly.


Web Traffic Growth

Above, we can see at a glance how traffic has changed over the last 30 days. Some days have highs or lows, but overall our total traffic has been growing daily. The blue trend line shows a steadily increasing average number of visitors, averaging about 125 visitors on March 31. The orange line shows totals per day, with a peak on March 20 of 151 visitors. It’s subtle, but there was a noticeable increase in the daily visitors once UNCG began working remotely on March 16, most likely driven by faculty visiting TIO Live! and students visiting the RCO pages.


Hourly Activity

Getting a little more granular, we can see what time of day was most popular among our visitors. The standard 9am-5pm window saw the highest average numbers of visitors, starting higher in the mornings and tapering off as the day progressed. One interesting outlier is 5am, which appeared to be a very popular time to visit our website. Digging into the data, it appears every Saturday at 5am our website saw a significant increase in traffic for a few minutes before leveling back out. The reasons for this are unknown, but the regular schedule suggests maybe an automated service was checking our website.


Age Demographics

Besides when our site is accessed, it’s also interesting to look at who is visiting the site. We can see above that nearly one-third of our visitors are in the 18-24 age bracket, with another 24% in the 25-34 bracket. This is about what we would expect, as most students fall into one of these ranges. The groups decline gradually with the exception of the 45-54 age range, which sees a slight standout value of 14.49% of visitors.

This may be due to the typical age of instructors at our university, but we can also consider parents of college students. The average age of a new parent in the United States is around 26 years old, which would put many parents of our students into the 45-54 bracket. It’s hard to make confident claims without digging further into the data, but these numbers can give us an idea of who is visiting the UTLC website.