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Intelligence
Visualize Mobile Traffic

Intelligence

Visualize Mobile Traffic

May 07, 2013By Greg Zguta

I have blogged about mobile traffic in higher education, and how the last several years have seen dramatic increases. During that time, responsive design and mobile have been hot topics as institutions work to find better ways to serve the changing needs of visitors.

The web analytics data around mobile traffic got me thinking about data visualizations and how visualizations can emphasize the importance of key metrics. In the business world, companies have been using data warehouses and business intelligence software to collect and report on their key performance indicators for years. In our work with higher education, we see increasing opportunities to use the wealth of data available to us to help meet all kinds of institutional goals.

I decided to take my web analytics data on mobile traffic and run it through a cool (free!) visualization tool called Tableau Public from Tableau Software. I thought I would I share my first experiment with the tool:

Learn About Tableau

The visualization includes mobile web traffic data from a smattering of institutions of different types (Universities, Community Colleges, Liberal Arts Colleges, etc.) for May 2010, May 2011 and May 2012. There is a tab at the top for each date, and it starts in May 2010 with all the data points clustered quite close together as mobile traffic was pretty low across the board. Click on the May 2011 tab and then May 2012 tab to see how the mobile visits and percentage of mobile traffic move ahead, and there starts to be some stratification of the data, with larger Universities showing some of the highest traffic from mobile.

Each data point is clickable and reveals details such as the number of mobile visits, percentage of mobile traffic and type of institution. At the top left are controls to show each month, which really shows how both the volume of mobile traffic and the percentage of mobile traffic have exploded over the last three years.

This is just a simple example of what the tool can do, but my takeaways are:

  • Visualizations of data can be fun and are a powerful way to emphasize key data points.
  • Tools like Tableau Public really put powerful business intelligence concepts into the hands of users better than ever before.
  • It doesn’t take much more than an interest in data and familiarity with Excel to be able to put together a small data set and produce visualizations.
  • It’s exciting to think about how mobile traffic will continue to grow — I’m anxious to plug May 2013 data into my test visualization.

Are other folks using Tableau for visualizations? Are there are other tools higher education is using for this? I’d love to see other examples and ways we can visualize key metrics and put our data to use!


  • Greg Zguta Director of Web Strategy I've been working on education web projects since the late 90's and enjoy visiting campuses and watching how technology has transformed higher education since I got my first email account at Oberlin College in 1992. Back then, I mostly used the web to check weather radar and sports scores . . . I suppose technology hasn't transformed everything yet.