Hello,
The Discovery Portal Team recently completed a second running of a survey
on the
Wikipedia.org portal, using a non-intrusive banner, from June 13
through June 28, 2016.
Our goal was to target those visitors that arrive at the portal page but
don't actually do anything, as these "non-action" page visits account for
about 43% of the portal's daily pageviews. We also wanted to see if we
could get additional respondents to the survey by using a different
bucketing system and running it for a longer timeframe.
We wanted to see if the results would indicate that many visitors have
wikipedia.org set as their browser's default home page
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Home_page>. Our thinking was that the
non-action pageviews are occurring because each time a visitor opened up
their preferred browser, their homepage would display the Wikipedia portal
page but the user simply goes onto a different site without using the
portal first.
The resulting data was very similar to our first running of the survey in
May 2016, as shown in the attached graphs - displaying the breakdown of the
June survey [1] and also displaying a comparison of May vs June survey
results [2]. The results overall were that most visitors had bookmarked the
site in their browser and the second most popular selection was that they
typed 'wikipedia' to get to the portal.
I've also included a sanitized pdf [3] of all the *'other'* answers to our
survey, for those curious about the content of the free text answers that
were collected. Some of the responses are fairly humorous *"I took the 5
oclock train"* and some were a bit more serious *"I typed in the URL of the
website. Not the word "wikipedia" but "http://www.wikipedia.com
<http://www.wikipedia.com/>". It's how I **normally navigate to a website
I
know the name of." *and we received plenty of love too *"**I love ❤ your
site"*.
Our goal of trying to get those non-action visitors to do an action (namely
to take our quick survey) probably failed miserably but, on the other hand,
we received a lot of other really good information that will be quite
useful to our future updates to the Wikipedia portal.
Cheers from the Wikimedia Discovery Portal Team,
Deb, Jan and Mikhail
[1] Survey results (graph)
<https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Graph_-_Screenshot_of_a_Wikipedia.org_Portal_Qualtrics_survey_results_June_2016_01.png>
[2] Comparison of May vs June 2016 survey results
<https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Graph_-_Comparision_of_two_Wikipedia.org_Portal_survey_results_May_and_June_2016.png>
[3] Text answers from survey
<https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:PDF_-_Text_answers_from_a_Wikipedia.org_Portal_Qualtrics_survey_-_June_2016_03.pdf>
--
Deb Tankersley
Product Manager, Discovery
IRC: debt
Wikimedia Foundation