Using Google Analytics and other tools to visualise how our global navigation gets used

One of the big challenges of a responsive design, especially for a large site like ours, is how to tackle navigation.

When you're designing for large screens there's a lot of horizontal space available, so you can include quite a lot of links without feeling that you're overcrowding the page.

Our header navigation is fairly typical of other university websites, with links to all the major areas of our site and links for our main audiences.

Our header contains 15 links and a search box

Counting the links, there are 15 in total, plus a search box. Here's the full list:

1. Homepage (via logo)
2. Study
3. Research
4. Business
5. Departments
6. International
7. About 
8. News
9. Events
10. Contact
11. Jobs
12. Visitors
13. Alumni
14. Current students
15. Staff

So, how do we fit all of these links in to a design that's going to work on small screens? Actually, let's take a step back and look at a different question: do we need all of these links in the first place?

Looking at the numbers

Taking inspiration from the GDS post on 7 ways we’ve used Google Analytics ‘outside the box’, I wanted to get an idea of how our users are moving between the main parts of our website, and whether they were using the global navigation links that we provide in our headers.

Google Analytics isn't great at answering this type of question directly, so first of all I exported a load of data using Supermetrics Data Grabber for Excel, looking at what the sources of traffic were to all of the pages that are available in our global navigation. 

Configuring a report in Supermetrics Data Grabber

I grabbed the data for the whole of last year so that any seasonal variations were taken into account. Supermetrics Data Grabber can handily download unsampled data, which is another problem that Google Analytics has when you try to look at big picture problems over a long time period.

Some of the raw data - not pretty (yet)

I then started to clean up the data, replacing the path names with plain English labels and adding values to show what level in the hierarchy we were looking at.

This is already quite useful, and allows me to quickly answer questions that would be time consuming in Analytics.

For example, if I wanted to see how many pageviews the staff homepage gets that come from either the Study or Research branches, I just need to tick a few boxes and Excel's filters take care of the rest. (If you're interested, the answer is 4,450).

Excel's filters are a quick way of segmenting traffic

Pivoting

We can then go a step further and put this data into a pivot table.

The table below shows branches of our site along the top, and the pages that are available from our global navigation down the side, so we can see how much traffic is going from one area of the site to another.

Expressing these numbers as percentages and applying some conditional formatting lets us see some patterns. Right away we can see how the homepage is acting as a major jumping-off point to the other areas of the site (which shouldn't come as a surprise).

Patterns begin to emerge

We can also see which parts of the site have strong linkages between them, and where the links are weaker.

What next?

We're still making sense of this data, and are looking at other sources such as CrazyEgg and search logs, but we're getting the strong feeling that we don't need to provide as many global navigation options as we do currently, and certainly not as prominently. The homepage is the exception to this as it's a starting point for a diverse range of users, but most of the time it's more important to present users with links related to the content that they're looking it rather than links to completely different areas of the site.

Are homepage carousels effective? (AKA the Brad Frost Carousel Challenge)

After reading Brad Frost's blog post about the effectiveness of carousels a couple of months ago, I decided to take up his challenge and see just how well the carousel on the University homepage was performing.

We put a lot of effort into producing a steady steam of features to go into the carousel, but does anyone actually read them?

The University of York homepage, complete with carousel in the top right

Our carousel is of the auto-advancing variety, with controls for pagination and pause / resume provided below. We didn't previously set a limit on the number of items that could be displayed in the carousel, but there were often eight or nine items to cycle through at any one time.

The results are in

We started tracking clicks on the carousel slides towards the end of February, along with clicks on the pagination and play/pause controls below. Technical details of the tracking setup can be found towards the end of this post.

For the first two weeks of tracking (20 February to 5 March), the distribution of clicks on the carousel slides looked like this:

Click distribution on carousel slides, 20 Feb to 5 March

It didn't come as too much of a surprise that the slide in first position got the most attention, but I wasn't expecting to see such a large skew. Around half of the clicks were on the first slide, with numbers dropping off rapidly after that. The poor slides in position eight were barely ever seeing the light of day.

The pause / resume button is rarely used, with less than 300 events registered (257 pauses, 36 resumes) since we've been tracking it. This suggests that the button is probably not noticeable enough.

Fewer carousel slots = more clicks?

Given that the items in positions outside the first few slots weren't getting much attention, we decided to reduce the number of items we have in the carousel to a maximum of five.

Total numbers of carousel clicks, 20 Feb - 27 March

We reduced the number of slots to 5 on around 15 March. Since then we've seen consistently more clicks on the carousel than we did when there were more features to choose from.

A possible explanation is that some of stories that we've had in the carousel over the last couple of weeks have been a bit more high-profile than usual (the announcement of our new Vice-Chancellor, BBC Question Time being broadcast on campus and our China graduation ceremony), which may have generated more interest anyway.

A more interesting theory is that we're seeing the paradox of choice in action - that giving people more choices creates anxiety and results in them not choosing anything. By reducing the number of items available to choose from, it's easier to make a choice and click on something.

We'll come back to this in a few weeks and see if we're still generating more clicks with fewer features.

The technical bit

If you're interested in how we're tracking this, read on.

Clicks on each of the carousel slides are tracked as events in Google Analytics. Analytics requires three values when tracking an event (category, action and label), which we're tracking as follows:

• Event Category: Carousel
• Event Action: slide-N clicked 
• Event Label: Destination URL

So an example event might look like:
'Carousel', 'slide-1-clicked', 'http://www.york.ac.uk/50/events/china/'

The call for each event is automatically assembled with jQuery, so there's no manual tagging required each time a new item is added to the carousel.

Categorising events in this way seems to work well as it allows us to view the data in quite a lot of different ways within Analytics.

Look out for

Something that tripped me up at first was that not all of the clicks on the carousel were registering with Analytics, and were appearing as 'cancelled' requests within Chrome's inspector panel.

Look out for cancelled requests (shown in red) in Chrome's inspector panel

The simple solution to this is to delay the request by a fraction of a second so that the event has time to register before the destination page starts to load. See Google's documentation on tracking outbound links for how to do this.

Saying goodbye to Internet Explorer 7

I was digging around in Google Analytics last month and noticed a slightly worrying trend: while IE6 usage has gradually been gradually falling to an almost insignificant amount, the number of visits from IE7 users has been showing hardly any sign of waning over the last year, holding steady at around 6% of all our traffic.

Surprisingly, a very large chunk of the IE7 traffic was coming from devices on the University network, even though most people are running either IE8 or 9. It turned out that this was because there's a setting in IE9 to 'Display intranet sites in Compatibility View' (where Compatibility View makes IE9 behave as if it's IE7), and this was enabled by default for york.ac.uk.

A couple of quick emails to IT Services later, and a change was pushed out to all supported desktops to turn this setting off (unless the user had manually set it).

The change was immediate:

Change in internal IE7 traffic after disabling Compatibility View for intranet sites (the regular dips are weekends)

We're now down from 18% to 6% for our internal IE7 traffic, and overall it's come down a couple of percentage points from 6% to 4%.

Going mobile, one small step at a time

Earlier in the year I wrote a post on Mobile browser trends into 2010, where I looked at how traffic from mobile devices had be steadily rising from around a thousand visits per month in April 2009, to seven thousand visits per month in April 2010.

I hadn't been paying too much attention to these figures lately, but I was quite shocked to see that mobile traffic had rocketed up to twenty thousand visits per month. Perhaps a bigger shock was that this increase had been much less gradual than over the previous year. Growth had remained steady until September this year, but then the start of the new academic year saw a doubling of visits - hello to our new intake of smartphone-carrying students.

Smartphone traffic to york.ac.uk, 24 December 2009 to 24 December 2010. The huge leap is the start of the new academic year

So will 2011 be the year that we start to make some headway into the mobile world? Hopefully we can make some time alongside the other projects that we've committed to for next year.

Making our blog mobile-friendly

How the blog now appears on an iPhone

My actual reason for writing this post, before I got distracted by looking at graphs, was to say that this blog now has a mobile enabled template, so should be much easier to read on a smaller screen.

(Aside - if you're a blogger user, this is really simple to enable for your own blog. See New mobile templates for reading on the go - Blogger in draft.)

While we may not have a mobile version of the university website for the twenty thousand people who look at it each month on their mobile, the small band of followers of this blog can now enjoy a better mobile reading experience.

Merry Christmas everybody!

Accidentally building an audience on Facebook

It's almost exactly three years since I set up the University's Facebook Page, as part of the landgrab when 'Pages' were first introduced. Since then we've done very little with the page other than keeping it ticking over. I've kept a slow trickle of updates flowing into our stream, usually press releases or public lecture listings, but very little else.

Given the lack of effort expended, it's been to a bit of a surprise to realise of late that our Facebook Page has become rather popular. We're approaching 6000 'likes'. We've almost trebled our number of 'likes' in 12 months, with a big spike when A-level results came out but continuing to grow at 50 - 80 new ones per week (see images below). This is especially impressive given that we've never posted a link on the homepage or main student pages of the website.





Our levels of interaction are relatively low; we get tiny numbers of 'likes' or comments on most posts and almost no questions on our wall, though we do very little to encourage any. But last night when I posted an update about our presence on University Challenge we picked up half a dozen comments and 45+ 'likes' within the hour. We also know that we get a small spike in traffic to stories on the website or videos on YouTube when we post them on Facebook. In short, it's clear that there's an audience out there and that it's comprised of people who, having sought us out, are interested in what we have to say (especially when we say something interesting!)

The ambition of Facebook's expansion - the changes to Messages announced yesterday, the Foursquare-style checkins, the open graph Facebook-isation of the whole Web and persistent rumours about ventures into search and mobile - mean users may well soon be spending even more time in Facebook. For the forseeable future we'll be continuing with our light touch approach, but as Facebook grows and our audience on Facebook grows too, we may find that we've accidentally grown a valuable communications channel deserving of much more attention.

Related info: For anyone wondering if their department or office should be on Facebook (or Twitter, or LinkedIn etc.), we're producing some guidelines to help you decide and to help you do it well if you do take the plunge. These aren't quite ready yet, but they're coming (better late than never!) In the meantime, feel free to contact us for individual help and advice.

Where does all the bandwith go?

Another graph-based post - stop me if you're getting bored of them!

Arthur from the Computing Service recently blogged about how the University's connection to the outside world gets used:
 

Here black is the overall, purple is streaming protocols and green is “standard” protocols (including http, email etc). A lot of people are watching a lot of videos and/or playing flash games.
(BTW If you’re wondering how academics ever get to do any work, most of that video is actually going to the student study bedroom network rather than the main campus network)

Some quick stats on the Uni’s external link 

Visualizing the last six months of work

A few of us in the office use the Tick time tracking application to keep track of what we're working on. I recently noticed that it was possible to export all the data it held into a handy Excel file (mmm, data) for further analysis. So it was a logical next step to take that data and create a Wordle word cloud out of it. Here's what has been keeping me busy for the last six months:


Not surprisingly, the CMS is keeping me busy!