What Are You Reading?

What does Google Analytics tell you? And what have you been reading on Teacher Toolkit?

We’ve switched to using Google Analytics to help improve the performance of our website. We share our data to here to help encourage further growth and offer something ‘geeky’ for the technical buffs …

Total Visitors

In May 2018 we had 81,509 users. This is up 4,801 since last month, achieving 171,847 views which is back up to our monthly average; it’s the back end of the examination season after all, but we’ve tried to ensure our content is revision focused. Note, users are not number of views which range from 2k to 7k readers each day.

Gender

Almost three out of four school teachers are female and four out of five school employees are female, with 73.9 % of full-time equivalent teachers in England who are female. When support staff are included, the overall figure rises to 80.2% of all school staff who are female. I am not quite clear on how Google calculates gender by users, so I will report back in June 2018 with more analysis. From a cursory glance, it appears that the majority of Teacher Toolkit readers mirror the national picture.

Peak Time Analytics

Sundays and Mondays continue to be peak reading time; Saturdays continue to also see high traffic. Our most popular day last month saw 8,732 views for this blogpost on Kunskapsskolan teaching.

New vs. Returning

Our growth is increasing with new sessions at 63,313 this month – up from 59,576 last month – and with 53,233 of our readers returning to visit the site (compared with 49,189 last month). It’s fairly low traffic for us and gives us a real insight into the reading and working habits of teachers and our readers during the examination season.

Page Views

Compared to last month, our sessions are better at 171,847, compared with 160,719 last month, but still very low. Views per session time broadly stay at the same time of 1.47. This is the average page views per visit.

Sessions and Average Session Time

Sessions represent a period during which the user interacts with your site. This month figures have dropped by +7.15% to just 116,545 users interacting with the website. The average session time is 01:02 seconds, which is down -1.28%. This is why we aim to keep our blog posts to less than 700 words, or 3-minute reads. Teachers are busy people and need quick reads that are accessible…

Bounce Rate

We have started using a new reporting system after we discovered our data was duplicating. In December 2017 it was 47.2% and now it is 80.30%! It is improving but it is not where we want it. We are slowly moving to sharing less on social media to improve the bounce rate and move towards a position where we are established and readers naturally come to us. If we share too much on social media, we run the risk each time that 250,000 don’t click on that one link. An average bounce rate for mainstream websites is 41-55%. So, we have a lot of work to do.

Organic Traffic

Organic traffic is website visits that come to Teacher Toolkit as a result of unpaid search results. Other represents traffic generated by other means e.g. paid for content. This is very interesting to us and requires deeper research, as we rarely pay for promoted traffic and suspect ‘Other’ to mean traffic generated by our social media channels e.g. Twitter outside of the website. Overall, the organic traffic has increased – which is good news for us.

Sources of Traffic

Most readers are coming to TeacherToolkit from Google (47,278 traffic users), which is great considering we push out most of our content via social media. This shows that our SEO is starting to work within Google and that Twitter is no-longer driving most of our traffic.

If there any other stats you’d like us to include in next month’s ‘What Are You Reading?’, just let us know. We can also help you with social media exposure and social media training.