What do people read on the Teacher Toolkit website?
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 July 2018 we had 57,867 users. This is down from 70,593 since last month – summer holidays anyone? In total, 112,000 views throughout July which is in the lower quartile of our monthly average. Even though our content is holiday focused, this is not enough to entice busy teachers away from their holidays! Note, users are not the number of views which range from 1k to 6k 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 is included, the overall figure rises to 80.2% of all school staff who are female. 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 3,324 views for Summer Bookshelf: books for teachers to read during the summer.
New vs. Returning
Our growth has declined with new sessions at 43,910 in July 2018 – down from 53,987 last month – and with 34,399 of our readers returning to visit the site (compared with 44,473 last month). It’s fairly low traffic for us and gives us a real insight into the working habits of teachers and our readers during the holiday season.
Page Views
Compared to last month, our sessions are lower at 112,849 compared with 141,786 last month. Summer holidays indeed! Views per session time broadly stay at the same time of 1.44. 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 -20.47% to just 78,309 users interacting with the website – that’s down from 98,460 last month. If you ever need data to show teachers are logging out of ‘thinking about teaching’ over the summer, here is your proof. The average session time is 01:09 seconds, which is down by -1.24%. 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 are slowly moving to share 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 people do not click on that one link. An average bounce rate for mainstream websites is 41-55%. So, we have a lot of work to do, but it is improving! Perhaps we should share less on social media to improve this?
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 (32,079 traffic users, down from 36,746 users last month; down -20.11%), which is okay considering it’s the summer holidays. 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.
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