Q4 Web Stats IR website usage increasing, along with Corporate Responsibility, Careers and RSS Feeds
Starting this past January we began aggregating the website statistics from our network of client IR websites. We plan to continue aggregating this data and then share interesting slices with our clients and the public. Our hope is that sharing this data will help all companies and their vendors build better websites and utilize web technologies more effectively.
Even though we only have 2 months of data and we’re in beta regarding our methods for aggregating, I wanted to share some initial observations that we thought were interesting. If you have any questions about this data or how we collect it please leave a comment or contact me.
During this past February we had 92,000 unique visitors who generated 740,000 sessions and 1.9 million page views. This means that on average each visitor returned 8 times during the month. This was up from 63,000 unique visitors and 420,000 sessions in January. This increase is mostly due a number of new clients coming online in Feb. :- )
The average length of each visit was 8mins 55secs, or roughly 1hr 14mins/visitor for the month. This was higher than I had expected. Even though the majority of visitors stay for less than a minute, the long-tail of the stats shows an impressive number staying beyond 5, 10 and even 30mins. We don’t have any data on hand to compare this with but will try and provide some benchmark comparisons in a future post.
The most popular time of day for people to visit is from 3pm to 9pm, with the least most popular time being 8am to 10am. This is also interesting as it goes against some traditional thinking that people like to visit sites with their morning coffee.
On an aggregate basis across all clients sites the top 5 sections (not including the homepage) were:
- News
- Corporate Responsibility
- Investors
- Careers
- Company
No surprise with News, Investors and Company being in the top 5. The surprise, (although it makes complete sense in this market) are the corporate responsibility and careers sections being in the top 5.
Last but certainly not least, in terms of specific pages visits the third most popular page accessed was the RSS feed for Press Releases. This is significant because in 2008, RSS feeds didn’t register in the top 25. Although RSS has many uses and we don’t know specifically how these feeds are being used, we do know they have grown considerably in popularity, which is great to see.
In closing, what has this data told us that we didn’t already know? According to our records:
- Investors and stakeholders are spending more time online with IR websites than ever before
- The interest level in corporate responsibility and careers is on the rise
- RSS adoption is growing rapidly across our network of sites
That’s all we have for now. If you have any questions or if there are other stats (browsers, OS, etc) that you’re interested in let me know and we’ll include in the next web stats post.
Related posts:
- BFI Canada enables Q4’s RSS feeds for Press Releases
- Q4 Web – RSS Feeds
- Increasing efficiency and reducing the risk of corporate disclosure
- RSS feeds and email alerts increase after SEC guidance
- Investor Relations Website Best Practices for Small Caps
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