johnabell.co.uk

I thought I’d blog some of the figures I worked out for my session at the AMSU conference over the summer. I’ll update these later this week to see what the figures are for October 2009 to see if anyone has joined Warwick SU in the millionaires club.

Page Impressions

If we want to be able to improve something it helps if we can measure it. The very nature of websites and the diverse functions of SU’s means there are many metrics you can use to see how well a site is performing over time:

Number of registrations, time spent on site, money taken through it, amount of forum posts, clubs and societies joined online, amount of advertising revenue gained, number of online survey responses, e-voting levels, unique users. . .

All these could and should be KPI’s as part of an SU’s web strategy however if I am just to pick one for this article then page impressions are as good as any. Page impressions are the amount of times pages are looked at so you have ten page impressions if one person looks at ten pages or if 10 people look at one page. These figures are usually analysed monthly to allow websites to benchmark against each other.  Although there are a few problems with relying just on this one metric, it is a useful indication of how busy your site is. It is also useful because SU website provider Bam publish page impressions for each of their sites so by analysing the figures from Membership Solutions Ltd (MSL) alongside theirs we can get a better picture of the whole market.

How busy are Students’ Union websites?

The busiest month for SU websites over the last twelve months was October 2008. If we take the page impressions for MSL’s 6 AMSU clients (3.9M) and Bam’s 50 AMSU clients (6.1M) and divide by 56 we can get average page impression per site for October 08 as 178,500. Multiply this by the 141 members of AMSU and this gives the page impressions for SU’s as 25M (obviously this figure has the completely unproven assumption that non BAM and MSL clients will have on average the same page impressions).

Here are the page impression figures for some media websites in October 09. I am not suggesting that SU websites are rivals to national newspapers, magazines and the BBC but it gives us something to measure against. Although it may seem unfair comparing SU’s busiest month, this was also most newspaper websites record month for page impressions due to the American elections.

As we can see Students’ Union websites are busier than Hello and Zoo but have some way to go before reaching the national newspaper websites.

Which SU site has the most page impressions?

Of the figures I have access to, Warwick SU was the busiest SU site in October 08 with 1.02M Page impressions. This is particularly impressive as this figure does not include sports clubs as these are hosted on a different site. If every AMSU member website was as busy as Warwick SU’s, then SU websites would have been busier than The Times Online.

If anyone knows of an SU other than Warwick getting more that 1M page impressions in a month, please let me know.

We had one of our new clients (Leeds SU) use the opportunity of relaunching their website over the summer to change their web address. They were luuonline.com and they changed it to leedsuniversityunion.org.uk

The subject of what tld  (web address ending) SU’s choose to use is an interesting one*. From the list below of the 100 largest SU’s you can see there is no obvious choice:

Although when I worked for Warwick I wrote the proposal to change the name to warwicksu.com from sunion.warwick.ac.uk; I think I lean towards .org now. It makes sense with the changes in governance and the shorter the better so I prefer it to .org.uk

What we really need is an SU with some cojones to buy the former USSR tld of .su - you can get one for just 600 rubles a year. That’s just £12 comrades.

*Well it’s interesting to me - I once sold the domain name www.obiwankenobi.mobi to a guy called Toby.