Analytics and search engine optimisation are now the food of every manager, almost cliché, but already business as usual. However, it remains a means to an end. And our end with equipment.data is to build the site so that it is useful for the sector, allows universities to comply, funders to verify and researchers to collaborate and use equipment outside their own lab if they require.
In an attempt to understand better how we could improve the site, we continued using the Google Analytics that Adrian Cox and University of Southampton have set up, the twitter account and at the end of April, we have also set up a Google Search Console account for equipment data. Although more information is always useful, I looked at the first two months of data.
As always, we welcome thoughts and suggestions and thank everyone who has been in touch and spent some time with us letting us know of their experience with the various metrics (especially Tim and Sigourney at UCL).
The Data
The data below covers the period 20/4/2017 to 15/6/2017 and is collected from three sources: Google Analytics, Google SEO and Twitter Analytics Dashboard.
1. Google Analytics:
Over almost two months the equipment.data site had more than 2 thousand users visiting the site more than 3 thousand times.
Most users are interested in consortium searches, their own institutional status pages and searching equipment of course. Below is a list of the top viewed pages:
| Page | Sessions | % New Sessions | New Users | Bounce Rate | Pages / Session | Avg. Session Duration |
| Landing page | 859 | 71.25% | 612 | 49.71% | 1.67 | 189.56 |
| GW4 consortium search | 95 | 75.79% | 72 | 44.21% | 1.32 | 157.92 |
| Sysmex SP-10 Slide Maker Stainer from University of Cambridge | 47 | 97.87% | 46 | 85.11% | 1.17 | 89.62 |
| University of Cambridge equipment page | 33 | 93.94% | 31 | 93.94% | 1.24 | 35.82 |
| Status page for all institutions | 31 | 22.58% | 7 | 48.39% | 7.65 | 318.48 |
| SES consortium search | 30 | 83.33% | 25 | 63.33% | 1.33 | 30.83 |
| Mettler Toledo TGA/DSC1 Star System from University of Bristol | 28 | 100.00% | 28 | 96.43% | 1.04 | 2.46 |
| FAQ page | 23 | 8.70% | 2 | 69.57% | 5.52 | 222.78 |
| 5 Axis Milling Machine (Hermle C20U) from University of Nottingham | 20 | 90.00% | 18 | 90.00% | 1.10 | 9.05 |
| UNIQUIP standard page | 20 | 35.00% | 7 | 85.00% | 4.15 | 86.80 |
| University of Manchester equipment page | 17 | 100.00% | 17 | 94.12% | 1.24 | 1.88 |
| Accent RMP 2000 Photoluminescence Mapper from University of Cambridge | 16 | 100.00% | 16 | 93.75% | 1.06 | 1.31 |
| Instron 1185 Universal Testing Frame from University of Surrey | 16 | 93.75% | 15 | 93.75% | 1.06 | 10.31 |
| Instron 4505 Universal testing frame from University of Surrey | 14 | 85.71% | 12 | 78.57% | 1.14 | 110.79 |
2. Google Search Console:
The Google Search Console is a beast. I’m not going to lie, it took me a few videos before I figured out exactly what to do. This is the first time we ran equipment.data through the search console, and here are the results. In two months we had 1802 clicks from 65 thousand times equipment.data came up in the search.
Furthermore, there are 92,438 links to equipment.data or its subpages. Amongst the top 20 domains with most links to equipment.data are the University of Southampton, Wrexham Glyndwr University and our Jisc website:
| Domains | Links | Linked pages |
| data.ac.uk | 74,994 | 37 |
| glyndwr.ac.uk | 15,224 | 1 |
| jisc.ac.uk | 1,650 | 5 |
| soton.ac.uk | 44 | 3 |
| odcamp.org.uk | 34 | 2 |
| wordpress.com | 34 | 1 |
| st-andrews.ac.uk | 32 | 3 |
| efficiencyexchange.ac.uk | 24 | 1 |
| jiscinvolve.org | 20 | 1 |
| jiscmail.ac.uk | 19 | 3 |
| ouseful.info | 18 | 1 |
| rmaco.com | 18 | 2 |
| cam.ac.uk | 16 | 1 |
| webeaver.com | 12 | 1 |
| lse.ac.uk | 9 | 1 |
| bournemouth.ac.uk | 8 | 1 |
| frontmatter.com | 7 | 1 |
| linkedup-project.eu | 6 | 1 |
| helpmeinvestigate.com | 6 | 1 |
| mdpi.com | 6 | 2 |
The Google Search Console also indicated some basic UX issues, such as small text, wider than screen content and too many clickable elements. Hopefully our new version of the interface will take care of some of these.
3. Social media analytics, mostly Twitter:
On Twitter, @equipmentacuk has 144 followers. We tweeted just over 20 times and gained more than 3 thousand impressions over the last 2 months. From more than 200 profile visits, about 15 users clicked to http://equipment.data.ac.uk.
Our most popular tweets are from Martin and Adrian’s attendance at the Technicians Summit at the University of Warwick.
Our 144 followers are quite the bunch, mainly from the UK and a few from around the world:
Next steps
We are making improvements to the user interface and navigation of equipment.data, and you can already find the staging site here: http://staging.equipment-data.data.alpha.jisc.ac.uk/. Please send me any feedback and suggestions.
We are working with a company specialised in SEO. They will review both equipment.data.ac.uk and the staging site and will recommend technical and content solutions for improving the site. Watch this space for their findings.
We encourage everyone to take a look at equipment.data, link to it from your web pages, tell your researchers about it – we would like to know what they think and what will make this site better and more useful for them.
Finally, we will aim to share our analytics and related data about the site every couple of months.