In my last E-Portfolio post, I talked about the ways Temple Athletics could implement Roger’s 5 Core Branding Strategies into their approach as they refresh Owlsports.com. There had to be a way for me to see if we connected owlsports.com to a Google Analytics account and put my Google Analytics IQ Certification to the test. So, I used what little pull I have in our business office to see if they would allow me to learn from our own Google Analytics accounts.

I scrubbed through the data I was granted access to. I have been studying the trends for over one month from March 14th to April 14^th. Some interesting points in the data that I came across could be addressed as Temple signs a new deal for a new website.

The Owlsports.com audience consisted of 68.6 % Male 31.4% Female. The largest age range was 18-24 at 22%. This probably accounts for recruits, current students, and the athletes themselves. Following were the 45-54 aged fans at 21%.

The number one language of users visiting the site was English in the USA at 80%. However, the 2^nd highest language used was Portuguese from Portugal with about 13,874 users which is 13% of the audience with a bounce rate of almost 99% and 4 seconds on each page. I’m assuming the page didn’t translate well to these visitors. Temple could hire a translating specialist or implement technology to better translate the pages since a decent following is coming from Portugal.

Behavior:

The average time a user spends on each page is around 2 minutes. People tend to be either scrolling through rosters or reading articles. The homepage had a bounce rate of 40%.

After looking at the whole month two very specific dates show themselves on the graph – March 22^nd and April 5^th. I went back and forth between the Google Analytics charts and Owlsports.com and found those two dates were directly related to Temple Women’s Basketball. March 22^nd was when the Tonya Cardoza article came out about her not returning for another season. April 5^th was when new Temple Women’s Basketball head coach Diane Richardson was hired. These articles led to an increase of 3,000 new users to the site combined.

Looking Forward:

There are multiple segments of users that visit Owlsports.com. With all this data being at our fingertips, there are a few directions this website refresh could go to take the website to the next level. Creating a more personalized experience for users with all the information easy to find would be a step in the right direction. I would love to see the creation of an Owlsports app to connect fans to information, tickets, and profiles faster. Most of the users accessed the website through a mobile device. Creating a better user interface via a mobile app would give easier access to Temple Athletics. Then, we could track the data easier to deliver a better experience for each individual. A metric or survey that would be interesting to add to this site would be the number of alumni that visit. Temple could implement this metric by creating a login or portal for owlsports.com fans. One of Temple’s main goals is to engage alumni better, this would be a great start.

Sources:

Data sourced from Google Analytics Account from Owlsports.com with the permission of Temple Athletics