98,735 unique visitors in one year! A review of the readership of the BU Research Blog

We regularly monitor engagement with our award-winning BU Research Blog using the fabulous Google Analytics tool. Over the past year engagement has been incredible. The stats below are based on the period 6 November 2013 to 5 November 2014 (1 year).

On average during this period the blog received 98,735  unique visitors, each spending approximately 3 minutes on the site. The blog is generally much busier on weekdays attracting between 250 and 1,200 unique visitors each day. In total there have been almost 200,000 page views.

The majority of our visitors came, unsurprisingly, from Bournemouth and Poole (23%), indicating that the blog is alive and well among BU colleagues. The next ten UK cities from which visitors most frequented the blog were:

  1. London
  2. Southampton
  3. Manchester
  4. Birmingham
  5. Edinburgh
  6. Sheffield
  7. Exeter
  8. Bristol
  9. Cambridge
  10. Bath

This map shows the locations of all the cities from where the blog has been accessed in the past year:

 

46% of all visitors are from outside of the UK and over the past year we have received visits from people based in 197 different countries. The top ten countries from which visitors most frequented the blog were:

  1. USA
  2. Philippines
  3. Spain
  4. India
  5. France
  6. Germany
  7. Canada
  8. Australia
  9. Italy
  10. Netherlands

Approximately 61% of visitors find us via internet search engines. The top search terms that led readers to our blog over the past year are:

  • sky
  • poverty
  • environment
  • Africa
  • USA
  • transport
  • Santander
  • help
  • good luck
  • jcr 2013 / journal citation reports 2013
  • BU Research Blog
  • welcome
  • sport
  • world poverty
  • tourism
  • Brazil
  • human resources
  • recommendation thesis
  • health and wellbeing
  • lay summary

29% of visitors are direct traffic, i.e. via the web address, the BU Staff Intranet, or the Daily Digest email. This is excellent as it shows that you lovely people who work at Bournemouth University are using the blog – hooray!

9% of visitors are referred to our blog by external sites. Our top referring sites are:

Over the year 25% of visits to the blog were made by returning visitors and 75% were made by new visitors.

Of those who access the blog direct (i.e. mainly BU staff) the 10 most accessed pages last year were:

This is all excellent news 🙂 We’re always open to receiving feedback about the blog – please email us at any time with any comments, suggestions, etc, or add a comment to this blog post.

If you would like access to add your own stories and posts to the blog then email Rhyannan Hurst (rhurst@bournemouth.ac.uk) and she’ll get you started!