Digital communications team annual report

Stephen Evans
Monday 29 February 2016

2015 was a very eventful year for the digital communications team. Here are some of our highlights.

Digital transformation

In February, Paul Boag visited St Andrews to give a lecture on digital change. We then worked with Paul in March and April to develop a prototype website to demonstrate how the external website could be improved. The prototype was a critical step towards developing the subsquent business case that was approved in September and forms the basis of the digital prospectus we are now working on.

Also in 2015, the digital communications portfolio board was formed to enable anyone to submit an idea for improving the website or any other digital service. This enables the team to focus efforts on work that is of strategic importance.

In November we launched a new digital standards website, in which the service manual set outs the policies and procudures we want everyone to follow when working on the University website.

New web pages

In June we launched a new University home page and top level pages using our digital pattern library. The new pages are mobile friendly, enabling visitors to easily move from the home page to Study at St Andrews, which is the most popular part of the website.

The graduation website was redesigned, resulting in a 31% increase in pageviews compared to 2014. There was also a 60% increase in visits from a mobile or tablet device.

The new orientation website was also a success, in part due to an improved social media campaign.

The School of Economics and Finance website was updated to use the digital pattern library.

Iterative improvement

At the start of 2015 the team were trained in the DSDM Atern Agile methodology of project management. This approach has been at the heart of improving services for our users and managing our resources. In the past year, a large number of our blog posts have been on how we use Agile:

New staff

2015 was also very eventful with the loss of two team members and the addition of four new staff. We are currently a team of nine, soon to be ten. The addition of experienced and skilled staff has been a huge boost to the way we work and our productivity. For example, we are now able to offer regular training courses and support for social media.

The year in numbers

Compared with 2014, the total number of pages viewed on the website has decreased by 3.6% in 2015. This decrease can be attributed to a reduction in the number of people visiting the University website having been referred from Google web assets. The number of visits to the University website from search engines such as Google has increased, whilst referrals from social media have decreased in comparison to 2014. The number of individual visitors to the website increased by about 5% in 2015, and 40% of visitors to the site in 2015 were new to the University website.

The following data is for 1 January 2015 to 31 December 2015:

Pageviews

Pageviews in 2015

Pageviews means that number of times that the pages of the University website were viewed, by both students and staff and by people from outside the University. In 2015, 21,063,114 pageviews were from people outside the University; 72% of total pages viewed. This shows that the majority of pages on the University website viewed are by external users, or people not using the University network.

Visits

visits-2015

Visits refers to the number of times that the University website was visited in total – counting every single time a person accesses the website. In 2015, 5,644,164 visits came from external visitors – 66% of everyone who visited the website. There were 2,921,915 visits from internal visitors.

Unique visitors

unique-visits-2015

Unique visitors is a count of how many times the website was visited by individual users – there were 2,604,781 unique external visitors in 2015, and 1,0101,589 unique internal visitors.

Countries

The proportion of visitors from outside the University network increased from 70% in 2014 to 72% in 2015. Top countries:

  • 13% United States
  • 2.5% Germany
  • 2% China
  • 2% India
  • 1.7% Canada

countries-infographic

Most popular pages

For external visitors, the most popular pages were information about how to study at St Andrews (23% of page views).

For internal visitors, current students (15%), current staff (8%), IT support (6%) and the library (5%) pages continued to be most popular.

Browsers

  • 33% Chrome
  • 26% Safari
  • 23% Internet Explorer
  • 13% Firefox

browsers

Mobile

The use of mobile devices continues to rise, particularly for external visitors. About 1 in 4 visits are now via mobile devices (an increase of 5% from 23% in 2014 to 28% in 2015). Mobile phones are the most popular way to view the website (nearly 3 times as popular as a tablet).

% visitors using mobile devices

Support calls

As well as working on projects, the digital communications team also undertook support and maintenance, most of which was handled through UniDesk. In 2015, we answered 1386 support calls.

Support calls 2015

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