Intro
What can we find out about postgraduate students' information needs by looking at the analytics information we have available?
Reports and analysis
All analytics reports are based on the “Filter out staff oncampus” Google Analytics property since students are our target audience.
I’m no Google Analytics expert so feel free to look into whether it's possible to dig more information out of Google Analytics and to check my assumptions.
See also:
How analytics can inform WIP II
Summary of insights
As Google Analytics is currently set up, it’s easier to get information about the demand for content (number of pageviews or searches) than it is to get information about actions or paths through content (events, exits).
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The most viewed and most searched for PG-related content covers:
- courses*
- apply/application/entry (including PhD proposals)
- scholarships
- thesis/theses/research (including finding topics)
- career/work
- fees
- PhDs/doctorates
- professional/vocational programmes
* Note that some students use the term 'course' as we use 'programme'. See Searches including the term 'courses'.
Content blocks
Some of this high demand content might is likely to be provided as content blocks within the pages for each individual PG programmeprogrammes:
- courses
- apply/application/entry (including PhD proposals)
- scholarships
- thesis/theses/research (including finding topics)
- career/work
- fees
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The higher level high demand content could guide any prioritisation we might do (e.g. how much work we put into it, when we tackle it, future attention the pages get).
If so, we could focus on prioritise information about:
- PhDs/doctorates
- Professional/vocational programmes
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The internal search report will be useful for checking our language use, making sure to make sure we use the terms students use when looking for a particular piece of content.
e.g. do more search for “teaching” or “education”?
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All analytics reports are based on the “Filter out staff oncampus” Google Analytics property since students are our target audience.
I’m no Google Analytics expert so feel free to look into whether it's possible to get more information out of Google Analytics
What is the most viewed PG content?
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The data isn’t based on a comprehensive collection of all PG-related content but it should be indicative.
I've just discovered that it may be possible to set up Page groups within Google Analytics (a way to group multiple pages and analyze site traffic in terms of these groups instead of the individual pages) though this needs admin access. This might have been a better way of putting together this report.
Analysis of the most viewed PG content
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I grouped together the top pages into ‘themes’. I went through top results and for each content 'theme' that I identified in the top 50 pages (e.g. phd, courses, masters, scholarships), I totalled up the number of pageviews of pages with URLs containing that theme.
Top themes | Total pageviews |
phd/doctorate | 496382 |
courses | 323205* |
master | 256414 |
apply/application/entry | 229897 |
professional programme | 158166 |
scholarship | 76462 |
mba | 70235 |
diploma | 66815 |
certificate | 59903 |
honours | 40933 |
law | 37556 |
mis | 29009 |
thesis/theses/research |
28950 | |
career/work | 28058 |
nursing | 27539 |
viaf | 27092 |
mim | 25402 |
mpa | 23586 |
*(46529 excluding main victoria.ac.nz/study/programmes-courses/ pages)
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Top 10 top-level sections containing PG-related content
Top-level section name | URL | Total pageviews |
Faculty of Graduate Research | 439964 | |
Future students | 326636 | |
International | 299816 | |
School of Management | 134908 | |
School of Geography, Environment and Earth Sciences | 84638 | |
School of Information Management | 74149 | |
School of Economics and Finance | 65517 | |
Faculty of Education | 59150 | |
School of Biological Sciences | 54642 | |
Graduate School of Nursing, Midwifery and Health | 50405 |
Insights into top-level sections containing PG-related content
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- scholarships information
- date or time-related information (e.g. key dates, exam timetables, trimester 3)
- courses
Note on bias in search data
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| View file | ||||
|---|---|---|---|---|
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Top external Google searches - Filter out staff oncampus 2016-01-18-2016-04-17.xlsx
To try to narrow the data down to PG-related searches, in the Selected PG-related themes tab I pulled together queries that include these terms: postgraduate, post, graduate, certificate, diploma, masters, hons, phd, doctor, mba, research, thesis
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- information about how to do a PhD proposal
- scholarship information
- information on choosing thesis and research topics.
| Anchor | ||||
|---|---|---|---|---|
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These suggest students use it as an equivalent of our 'programme' (‘postgraduate courses in new zealand’, ‘post graduate diploma courses in new zealand’, ‘graduate diploma courses in new zealand’, ‘victoria university postgraduate courses’, ‘pg diploma courses in new zealand’, ‘diploma in development studies courses’, ‘postgraduate nursing courses’, ‘post graduate diploma courses’, ‘diploma courses in new zealand’)
What searches are made from PG pages?
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- psychology
- nursing
- mba
- phd
- TESOL
- accounting
- teaching
- creative writing
plus:
- fees
- scholarships
Insights
- The top 10 is dominated by vocational subjects
- Potential content blocks based on popular searches are:
- fees
- scholarships
Notes
Note: Searches made from pages with ‘postgraduate’ in URL is a small dataset.
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Note that current data on exits is incomplete and In-page reporting isn't currently working.
We may be able to get this information on a page by page basis as required via Behaviour > Site content > All pages > Navigation summary tab or by setting up Page groups.
What are ‘conversion rates’ like (clicking on Apply / Get in touch links)
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