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WEBTEAM

University Web Traffic Declines

Traffic at the Health Science Center's web site declined in 2007 for the first time in five years, settling on a total of 24 million page views, down 1.5 percent from 2006.

Page Views by Year
11.2 million
2003		 17 million
2004		 19.5 million
2005		 24.4 million
2006
 24 million
2007
Source: Systems and Network Operations Department

A "page view" is a marketing metric that describes one person -- actually a computer IP address -- viewing one page during a set period of time. The university only counts visits at least three days apart to exclude multiple visits by the same person, said Jim Barrett, webmaster.

Traffic on the Health Science Center's two institutional web servers had risen sharply since recordkeeping began in 2003. "These latest totals do not measure the activity on more than a dozen additional web servers running on campus," Barrett said. "I'd estimate that these servers receive an additional 5-8 million page views a year."

The Health Science Center hosts about 150 web sites for departments, schools and other entities on the institutional servers. On these servers, the most active single web page is the university portal, inside.uthscsa.edu, which was viewed about 527,800 times a month, based on 2007 statistics. The top 10 sites, based on page views, are:

  1. University homepage (429,700 page views a month)
  2. School of Medicine (75,700)
  3. Teacher Enrichment Initiatives (68,400)
  4. HSC News (59,900)
  5. Calendar of Events (49,212)
  6. Office of Human Resources (46,900)
  7. School of Allied Health Sciences (42,300)
  8. National Newborn Screening and Genetics Resource Center (38,700)
  9. The Mission (31,400)
  10. Faculty Research Profiles (23,800)

Other statistical profiles from 2007:

  • Where are the visitors from? About half come from within the university, particularly for sites such as inside.uthscsa.edu, the web portal, Barrett said. Sites for schools and academic departments attract larger external audiences. About 75 percent of visitors to the School of Medicine web site, for example, are from outside the Health Science Center.
  • Browsers? About 83 percent of visitors use Microsoft Internet Explorer, followed by Mozilla-based browsers such as Firefox at 11 percent, and Safari, the Macintosh browser, at 3 percent.
  • Search engines? Google brings more traffic to the university's web sites than any other search engine. Traffic share: Google, 77 percent; Yahoo!, 17 percent, and MSN, 4 percent.