ESNBU WEB SITE TRAFFIC ANALYSIS 2019
We analysed the traffic to the ESNBU web site from Jan 1, 2019 to Dec 31, 2019 with a focus on the top 10 visiting countries, the top 5 downloaded articles and the conversion rate from “visitor” to “reader”. Here we present the results with brief comments.
Top 10 visiting countries
Unique visits: 53,022, not bad. The biggest volume of incoming traffic is from the USA, followed by Bulgaria and China, which is expected. The USA is one of the biggest academic output ‘consumers’ and many students search for content through their university libraries. The majority of this traffic comes through EBSCO which has been indexing ESNBU articles since the first issue. Most other databases which index the journal are also US-based, like MLA, and provide our content to the US college and university libraries.
Traffic from Bulgaria can be mostly explained with our headquarters and operations, as well as with our publishing and editorial activities which we advertise with fellow scholars in other Bulgarian universities.
Scholars from China are very active by definition but we have received and published only one article, in Vol. 5 issue 2, from there. Most traffic comes through the Chinese search engine SoGou. It is probably due to the indexing from the Hong Kong academic search engine which harvests metadata from EBSCO.
We expected Great Britain to be up in the list, but it is not. We hope this will change now that we are sending hardcopies of ESNBU to the British Library.
Russia and Ukraine have an almost equal share, 4th and 5th place respectively, right after China.
French scholars typically publish in French, so we believe the visits from there are from scholars and students who are in the field of English Studies and/or publish in English. Germany, bottom of our top ten visiting countries, also publishes predominantly in their language. So we conclude these two countries are the most focused groups of visitors.
South Korea is a surprise as we have not published articles, neither have we received manuscripts from this locale. With close to the same number of visits, Canada has emerged recently as an active visitor pool. See Table 1 for the exact numbers.
Table 1.
Top 10 visiting countries
The above expressed as percentage of page views shows that the visits from the USA account for 51%, a quarter from Bulgaria and China, and the rest of the countries, for the remaining one quarter of the visitors.
Figure 2. Page views by country (%)
Top 5 downloaded articles
The top 5 downloaded articles for 2019, from a total of 20,508 completed downloads, are as follows:
1. Gencheva, Andrea.(2016). Truth and illusion in Tennessee Williams' A Streetcar named desire, ESNBU 2(1), 31-41. https://doi.org/10.33919/esnbu.16.1.3 ☍ - 10,802 downloads
2. Elma Dedovic-Atilla, Elma. (2017). Byron’s and Shelley’s Revolutionary Ideas in Literature, ESNBU 3(1), 27-48. https://doi.org/10.33919/esnbu.17.1.2 ☍ - 3,452 downloads
3. Chankova, Mariya. (2015). Is there an illocutionary act of assertion?, ESNBU 1(2), 71-84,. https://doi.org/10.33919/esnbu.15.2.5 ☍ - 2,213 downloads
4. Troeva, Blagovesta. (2015). Teachers' perception of the differences in the reading profiles of students with dyslexia and the role of dyslexia assessment for an appropriate choice of teaching strategy, ESNBU 1(2), 27-40. https://doi.org/10.33919/esnbu.15.2.2 ☍ - 2,159 downloads
5. Anastasova, Maria. (2016). Patterns of creating suspense in Stephen King's The Shining, ESNBU 2(1), 43-58. https://doi.org/10.33919/esnbu.16.1.4 ☍ - 1,882 downloads
What immediately strikes is that all authors are female, all of them are young researchers, and three out of the five are in the field of literature. We should make a note here.
Additionally, three of the authors are PhD students at the time of publication – this is telling us we are on the right track by giving opportunities to young researchers and doctoral students.
Interestingly, A. Gencheva’s article (#1) has been top of all downloads every year ever since it was published! It is also the most downloaded article for January 2020 too, with double the number of downloads compared to all the other four articles ranking 2nd to 5th.
"Visitor" to "Reader" Conversion
Our methodology to calculate the visitor-to-reader conversion is simple. The conversion rate is expressed as percentage of completed downloads from the total visits, which is 38.68%. That is, a little over one third of our visitors have found the articles useful and worth reading.
Conclusions and final thoughts
We are happy! For a small, boutique journal, the stats are telling! There isn’t much traffic but it is focused. To us it means we are getting the visitors we want – scholars in the fields we publish.
Looking back, we can proudly say that we’re growing - slowly but steadily. And it is because we are building a community. If you want to be part of it, get in touch.