Most of the traffic to our BC student services portal is from users planning to apply to one of BC’s post-secondary institutions (PSIs). We recently reviewed Google Analytics (GA) reports for the purpose of determining how users get to these services.

Of the nearly 900,000 portal visits during the past year, visits were evenly spilt between directly entering the service URL (primarily pas.bc.ca) and those linked from BC college and universities (primarily through their “Apply” buttons). This tells us that the “pas.bc.ca” brand is widely known and used. Additionally, most of the 80,000 visits resulting from search engines were from users entering a variation of “PASBC” into their search bar.

Also of interest, we determined that visits resulting from links on BC government and related websites (achievebc.ca, educationplanner.ca, etc.) were very few.

Based on reports like this, we have the dual challenge of creating visual brand identification for PASBC that may then be used by institutions, and also providing stronger visual ties in the PASBC service itself that continue to reinforce institutional branding when visits result from links from their sites.

Another opportunity is to create internal reinforcement with related BCcampus services, such as the new BCcourses.ca tool, and potentially a transcript distribution service.

BCcampus is in the process of migrating each portalized service to separately provided and branded ones during the next year, so reports like this that help us better understand how users get to these services are very helpful.

BCcampus portal site stats 2009/11/1 to 2010/10/31

Origin of visits	# Visits	% of Visits
Links from BC PSIs	309,778	36%
Direct: pas.bc.ca, portal.bccampus.ca	307,274	35%
Links from other BCcampus sites	104,853	12%
Search: Google/Bing	79,781	9%
Links from external sites (includes all referral sites <500 annually)	66,555	8%