Last year I posted "An insight into wayne.edu traffic (opens new window)" which is an insight into the traffic to wayne.edu (opens new window) from June 15 – July 15, 2009. This year I wanted to do a comparison of the same week this year to last year's numbers.

Below you will find the stats comparison from June 15, 2009 – July 15, 2009 compared to June 14, 2010 – July 14, 2010, I wanted to make sure the days of the week were consistent.

Top Pages

Just a note about the index.php page and the % Change. It looks so high because last year we were not tracking the index.php filename and just the "/" directory.  I couldn't find a way in GA to compare the two different pages, drop me a line if you know how.

Referring Sites

In the past year direct traffic is down, it doesn't surprise me that more people are using search, specifically Google to find information from our site. The more sites that transition into the CMS the better SEO they contain and this is a great example of a result of that transition.

Top Browsers

Two big trends to notice with the browser change: Internet Explorer is steadily declining while Chrome is rising by leaps and bounds. If you are interested in the breakdown of which versions of IE are being used you can see them at the detailed IE usage table (opens new window). Basically IE6 is still at ~9% but is down from 30% last year. Hopefully next year it will be below 2%.

Operating Systems

What I want to point out on the OS table is the growth of everything mobile and the decline of the Windows OS. Android had the largest increase in visits for mobile and surprisingly the iPod is the only mobile device that declined in usage. I was actually surprised by the small increase in iPhone usage, I expected it to be more. This type of data is what we are looking to when developing our mobile strategy. I'll give you a hint, we are leaning toward a web centric interface instead of app centric.

Overall there are a few things to note about the change in traffic over the past year. Search traffic continues to grow and we are continuing to work on our SEO. Mobile traffic is growing and it doesn't look like it is going away. And lastly browsers are starting to get more diverse, IE is losing market share but doesn't look like it is going away any time soon. We still make sure our sites work in all browsers with experiences that match their capabilities.