Beledi Beat Winter 2009

Google Analytics

Nothing is as enjoyable to a tech junkie as driving through neighborhoods on a bright winter’s morning after a big snowstorm. To watch the snow flying, arching out of the snowblowers and trying to figure out if theirs is better than yours is to be in one’s own element. The next best thing if there is no fresh snow is to try to analyze the Jawaahir website to see how it is being used.

It has been a year since we added Google Analytics to the Jawaahir site and it is fascinating to see how our site is being used. Google Analytics is a free program from Google that allows us to track where our website traffic is coming from, and what our visitors do while they’re here with us. If you want to follow along, screen shots of the Google Analytics reports are reproduced to the left.

First, the big picture. In February 2009, 3,500 people visited our website from 80 countries, with a total of 10,500 pages being viewed. These numbers show an increase of about 15% from when we started keeping records last year. As one might guess, 3,000 visitors, or 86% of the total, come from the US, followed by 58 visitors from Canada, 47 from Saudi Arabia, 46 from Egypt, and 32 from the U.K. There were 651 different search terms used that led to our site.

Jawaahir is a transliteration from the Arabic word for jewels. This is a perfect name for the dance company as the Jawaahir dancers are indeed jewels to watch. The 32nd most used search term last month was جواهر, which is the Arabic word jewels. If you look at these particular visits, you see that only one page is visited, the time spent on the site is 0 seconds, and the bounce rate (how many times the visitor leaves the site directly from this page) is 100%. No one found content that they wanted. We think this represents people searching for precious stones in an Arabic search engine and getting to our site, realizing this is not what they were looking for, and leaving. The same statistics were true for the 5 visitors from Paris last month. Of course, not all of our foreign visitors have a bounce rate of 100%. Some are finding content that keeps them on the site, whether by design or accident.

We had 1,200 visits in February from Minneapolis. The average Minneapolis visitor viewed 3 pages and spent an average of  3 minutes on the site. According to Google, these are respectable numbers—these visitors are finding content that they want. The next three cities with the highest number of visitors to the Jawaahir site in February are Burnsville, St. Paul, and Hopkins. The fifth city is New York with 84 visits. The average visitor from New York also looked at 3 pages and spent 2 minutes on the site—not very different from the Minneapolis visitors, indicating that they are finding content that they want to look at and that the site has appeal to a larger geographic area.

After New York comes Rochester, MN then Riyadh, Saudi Arabia. Saudi Arabia has consistently been the third highest country to visit the Jawaahir website over the last year. In February the 43 visitors from Riyadh viewed 2.4 pages and spent over one minute on site. Other foreign visitors included the three from Zurich who viewed on average 5 pages and spent 7 minutes on the site and the 4 visitors from Hiroshima who also viewed 4 pages and spent 5 minutes on the site.

February brought two surprises, the first having to do with the Sparkle show that ran February 5-7. Analytics allows us to look at how many people visit a page on each day of the month. We had 535 visits to the Coming Events page in 31 days, or an average of 17 Coming Events page visits per day. On Friday, February 6 there were 83 visits, or 5 times the monthly average. On Saturday there were 65 visits, or 3 times the monthly average. These two days account for over 27% of the Coming Events page visits for the entire month.

If visitors are coming to our site to see if they want to go to the show, then we should also see a spike in the number of page visits to our Coming Events, Pictures and Videos page, called EventDetails,PicsAndVids.htm. The data for Friday, February 6 shows 114 page visits, or 3 times the daily average. The conclusion is that people are using the site to gather information to make decisions about coming to the shows.

The second surprise was Thursday, February 26, the day of a major snowstorm. Because we use CalendarWiz to maintain our calendars, the button on the home page redirects the user to our calendar on CalendarWiz. Google Analytics only acquires data for those people who click to the Calendar button from the Jawaahir site. It doesn’t count visits for people who have bookmarked the Jawaahir calendar on the CalendarWiz website. Thus, if anything, we are under-sampling.

That being said, the Calendar button on the home page was clicked 863 times in February, or 28 times per day. On Thursday, February 26 it was clicked 120 times or 4 times the daily average. I attribute this to the fact that the calendar is where we notify students of class cancellations and they are using the website to stay informed.

So to end, thanks to all. I was going to name everyone who is involved with the website, but in the end it is everyone. To the content providers, the dancers, musicians, costumers, and crew who bring the dance to life so we can tape it and add it to the website. To the office staff who keep the building going and write the grants to produce the shows. To the teachers who continue to train the next generation of dancers. To everyone who has been directly involved in getting the website up and improving it. Thank you all for letting me play with you and change a little bit of the world.