Fox 5 Analytics

597,691 people in the United States visited myfoxdc.com from Jan. 30th- Feb. 28th 2012, according to quantcast.com. The number of visitors has greatly increased since the end of last year when only 237,795 people visited the site each month.

The demographics of website visitors is examined on both analytics websites. According to quantcast.com the website is visited more by females, 54 percent female and 46 percent male. The age group 35-44 years old visits Fox 5’s website the most, 28 percent. Only 6 percent are 65 years and older whereas the age group 18 year olds makes up percent. People with no kids as well as those who earn $50-100k have higher percentages of viewing Fox 5’s website. It was no surprise to find that college graduates and post-graduates have higher percentages of visiting the site than people with no college. In terms of ethnicity Caucasians makes up 55 percent of visitors. However, I was surprised to find that  African Americans make up 33 percent of the composition, while Hispanics make up 7 percent and Asians 4 percent.

Alexa.com ranks myfoxdc.com as 5,625 in the U.S. and gives it a reputation 6,292. Websites such as google.com, yahoo.com and apple.com link to Fox 5’s website, which improves it’s rank in search engines.

The top 5 search queries from search engines that drive traffic to myfoxdc.com are Brazilian big brother show scandale, fox news, fox 5 news, fox 5 dc and fox 5. The show scandele query got 5.02 percent of search traffic, whereas fox 5 news got 1.20 precent. High impact search queries for this website include fox news, big brother show, fox 5 news and big brother. These queries are relevant to the site and are actively targeted by competitors advertising on search engines. Within the last month the percentage of site traffic from search engines is 4.6 percent.

This analytics website compared the website traffic of myfoxdc.com to that of wusa9.com, CBS’s affiliate news station located in Washington, D.C. Fox 5’s website is ranked 22,879 globally and WUSA 9 is ranked 52,371. I found this especially interesting because I interned at both TV news stations. According to these analytics websites myfxodc.com has been pretty successful in the amount of site traffic it gets. I was surprised with the number of views the website gets per month.

Simple Navigation

In terms of the website’s navigation, Myfoxdc.com puts an emphasis on local news stories and is very simple to navigate through. The navigation bar is located at the top of the website, under the banner. This makes it apparent to visitors the different sections of the website and conforms to the findings in eye tracking studies on how users read Web content.

The top of the page contains headlines and links to stories in categories (local, latest, national and weblinks). The center of the page has a carousel that shows the top 3 stories in different categories. A picture that goes along with the top story appears as to the left of the linked headlines. The navigation is consistent from page to page and there tends to be a carousel on each of the section pages. I find this moving element to be extremely useful as it allows viewers to have a glance at the latest headlines.

Individual stories are very basic and easy to navigate through; but they are not put together in a manner that engages the reader. This story on George Zimmerman being charged with 2^nd degree murder is an example of how almost all of the stories appear. A video is at the top, below that is text on the right and links to related stories on the left.

Fox 5’s homepage effectively links views and visitors to the bulk of the site. The “About Us” page is included in the navigation bar along with news, weather, traffic, entertainment, sports and other important topic sections. Myfoxdc.com may be easy to navigate through; but I believe a cleaner design would simplify navigation even more. The website has the basic gist of good page navigation; however, I find that the links box and carousal on the home page are distracting.