I thought I would share some insight into how visitors are getting to wayne.edu (opens new window). Below is some detail of the incoming traffic to the homepage and child pages from users who are off campus in the past month. Ideally these are people who get a first time glimpse of Wayne State as an institution.

Traffic sources from October 4 - November 3, 2009

487,781 visits via 1,623 sources and mediums

Even taking away all on campus traffic I am surprised to see over 50% is still coming directly.

Sources in Detail

Besides for direct traffic search engines are by far our next largest traffic source. It has been said by many people before and this continues to back it up, Google is your new homepage.

Search Engines

Google tops this list probably because we use it for all our internal site searches. This is off campus traffic but it does not necessarily mean the user started at google.com (opens new window). We use Google Custom Search on wayne.edu (opens new window) which will show up as traffic from Google. One thing I am still surprised about is how high aol still ranks, although it is no where near the top three it is still above quite a few big names. I checked out Baidu (opens new window), and it looks to be a Chinese search engine started in 2000.

Keywords

It is interesting to see the keyword list, I am going to assume the top five are from people who started at google.com since (I hope) they would not be searching for us on our homepage, but you never know. This is interesting because we do track the searches on wayne.edu and typically they are for something more specific list a program, professor or department. It does look like "bookstore" would be from wayne.edu since typing it into Google directly yields national bookstores, we rank no where in the top 10 pages.

Sites in Detail

As far as non-search traffic it is interesting to see a few things. Most people are referred to the homepage from one of our existing sites. Only two results, search.comcast, which technically should be under the "search engine" category and studentvoice.com. The thing about student voice is the traffic is probably non intentional, since it is a survey service by default once a survey is complete you are either forwarded to wayne.edu automatically or it is the only link on the page. We should probably try to get that changed to more of a "student portal" to try to get someone conversions from the current students taking surveys.

Countries

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This comes at no surprise, we are a US university in Detroit. US traffic dominates and we are 10 minutes from Canada. We also have a large international student body, students from 70 countries.

Take Aways

Besides for direct traffic, search is still king when driving people to wayne.edu. It is unfortunate we cannot examine this direct traffic further, it would be great to know out of the 50% how many people have wayne.edu as their homepage. It would also be nice to see if they are actually typing in the URL or have it in a bookmark or bookmark bar.

User habits have always intrigued me and we make a continued effort to examine these habits as they relate to the web. Although we can only post so much publicly I will continue to try to post as many insights as possible to better help you examine your users.