'New' COP website turns 1

Happy birthday, COP website! It’s been a year since the College of Pharmacy’s new website went live on January 28, 2011. So who’s been using the site? How much? What pages have they visited? How have they found us?

After a year of collecting Google Analytics data*, we share a summary of the information we’ve received.

How much was the COP website used?
Between January 28 and December 31, 2011:

• 136,626 people visited the COP website.
• Approximately 1,366 of those visitors were internal, from the College of Pharmacy.
• Together, people paid 282,604 visits to the site and viewed pages on the site close to a million times.
• The average amount of time users spent on the site during each visit was 3 minutes and 11 seconds.
• The average number of pages viewed per visit was 3.41.
• The percentage of visitors to the site who were new (who had never visited the COP website before) was 48.24.

What pages did visitors view?
As you would expect, the page visited most often on the College of Pharmacy website was the home page. That page received 235,820 views, or 24.49 percent of all page views, between January 28 and December 31, 2011. The next most-visited pages are listed on the following chart.

Where did visitors come from?
The majority of visitors to the COP website in 2011 (258,149, or nearly 54 percent) came from the United States. The countries with the next-highest number of visits are shown on the following chart.

As you’d guess, the top U.S. state of origin of visits to the website was Arizona, followed by California, Texas, New York, Illinois, Florida and Pennsylvania. The number of visits from Arizona was 181,212. The chart below illustrates the number of visits from other states.

In Arizona, the majority of the visits to our site came from Tucson, followed by Phoenix, Tempe, Mesa, Cortaro, Chandler, Scottsdale and Gilbert.

What did they use to get here?
More than 36 percent of visitors were using Internet Explorer as their web browser when they came to the COP website. Firefox, Safari and Chrome (Google’s web browser) were other ways visitors found us.

The number of people using mobile devices when they arrived at our site increased as the year went on, as the chart below illustrates.

How did they find us?
People used three primary methods to get to our website: direct traffic (where people input our url address directly), search engines (such as Google, where people search on key words) and referring sites (where people click on a link on another website, such as the UA’s, to get to our site).

• Direct traffic               108,893 visits
• Search engine          107,970 visits
• Referring sites            65,741 visits

Although the number of people getting to the website via direct traffic was close to the number of people using search engines, an analysis of the data over time reveals an interesting trend: direct traffic declined over the year, while the use of search engines increased. The chart below illustrates the changes.

What does all this mean?
From these data we can make some conclusions, such as the website is succeeding in reaching two of its most important target populations: prospective students and internal COP users.

By tracking how our website is being used and who is using it, we can tailor the site to reach our target audiences, including prospective students and alumni, and to monitor our progress toward goals that we set.

For example, data collected over the last year suggest actions such as:

• Beginning to optimize the website for mobile devices
• Being sure to include the most-searched-for key words in headlines, tags and opening paragraphs
• Targeting geographic regions for student recruitment

What about other pages?
According to A. Jay Gandolfi, associate dean, the graduate programs website (which is separate from the main COP site) is the college’s principal tool for recruitment of prospective students to our PhD and MS graduate programs. 

“Our completely revised website has been lauded by our new recruits,” says Gandolfi, “since it provides all the critical information for new recruits to move and settle into Tucson, as well as pertinent information about research opportunities with our faculty."

Current efforts on the website are aimed at promoting graduate students and their accomplishments to facilitate their securing postgraduate positions.

In terms of the most-visited pages, Gandolfi says, “Our Superfund and Binational Center websites [which are also external to the main COP site] are quite popular, with 1.3 million hits per year. The majority of the contacts are for our English and Spanish language information brochures on environmental pollutants and remediation techniques. Our Spanish language textbook on environmental toxicology continues to attract a lot of interest with many downloads of the book and its figures to people all around the world. We have been told the figures are used in a lot of environmental courses that are taught in many countries."