Data from: Improving the efficacy of web-based educational outreach in ecology

Scientists are increasingly engaging the web to provide formal and
informal science education opportunities. Despite the prolific growth of
web-based resources, systematic evaluation and assessment of their
efficacy remains limited. We used clickstream analytics, a widely
available method for tracking website visitors and their behavior, to
evaluate >60,000 visits over three years to an educational website
focused on ecology. Visits originating from search engine queries were a
small proportion of the traffic, suggesting the need to actively promote
websites to drive visitation. However, the number of visits referred to
the website per social media post varied depending on the social media
platform and the quality of those visits (e.g., time on site and number of
pages viewed) was significantly lower than visits originating from other
referring websites. In particular, visitors referred to the website
through targeted promotion (e.g., inclusion in a website listing classroom
teaching resources) had higher quality visits. Once engaged in the
site's core content, visitor retention was high; however, visitors
rarely used the tutorial resources that serve to explain the site's
use. Our results demonstrate that simple changes in website design,
content and promotion are likely to increase the number of visitors and
their engagement. While there is a growing emphasis on using the web to
broaden the impacts of biological research, time and resources remain
limited. Clickstream analytics provides an easily accessible, relatively
fast and quantitative means by which those engaging in educational
outreach can improve upon their efforts.