I’m working on presentation about assessment on another front, and as an excuse for a break I decided to post some recent UMW Blogs traffic statistics from the last four years. I know analytics and data is all the rage currently, and these numbers should somehow enable me to better articulate UMW Blogs’ usefulness. Nonetheless, they always seem at once massive and paltry. Massive in that various work produced on UMW Blogs by thousands of students have been viewed 13+ million times over the last four years by milliosn of people. Paltry in that 13 million views is a middling viral YouTube video at best.
Probably like most people in the era of “big data,” I often feel lost in a malaise of statisitcal aggregates—data that ultimately means less than nothing without a context. The only hope I garner from this is that people are finding our work, but not at the aggregate. Seems to me it’s at the ground level—thousands of sites with tens and hundreds of views each, I imagine it far more intimate than these numbers report. In fact, the greater the numbers get each successive year, the further the push towards statisitc ennui. They begin to get squeezed under the load: page visits fall, time on site plummets, and bounce rate increases. There is a story somewhere in all this, but I can’t for the life of me find it in the numbers. That said, I can’t pull my gaze away—a stare at once filled with awe and disdain.
Total Traffic on UMW Blogs from August 2009 – August 2013
Visits 6,354,607 | Unique Visitors 4,499,283 | Pageviews 13,711,836
Pages / Visit 2.16 | Avg. Visit Duration 00:01:46 | Bounce Rate 67.66%
Total Traffic on UMW Blogs from July 2012 – August 2013
Visits 2,395,096 | Unique Visitors 1,816,130 | Pageviews 4,555,082
Pages / Visit 1.90 | Avg. Visit Duration 00:01:28 | Bounce Rate 71.52%
Total Traffic on UMW Blogs from July 2011 – August 2012
Visits 1,860,488 | Unique Visitors 1,335,052 | Pageviews 4,115,743
Pages / Visit 2.21 | Avg. Visit Duration 00:01:45 | Bounce Rate 65.23%
Total Traffic on UMW Blogs from July 201o – August 2011
Visits 1,460,607 | Unique Visitors 978,405 | Pageviews 3,312,104
Pages / Visit 2.27 | Avg. Visit Duration 00:01:52 | Bounce Rate 65.72%
Total Traffic on UMW Blogs from July 2009 – August 2010
Visits 815,655 | Unique Visitors 542,230 | Pageviews 1,994,352
Pages / Visit 2.45 | Avg. Visit Duration 00:02:10 | Bounce Rate 66.17%
Total Traffic on UMW Blogs from July 2008 – August 2009*
Visits 57,415| Unique Visitors 41,658 | Pageviews 193,380
Pages / Visit 3.37 | Avg. Visit Duration 00:03:17 | Bounce Rate 63.58%
*We started Google Analytics in Summer 2008.
