2013 Conference

Financial Services

Financial Services

Using data from Google Analytics, we looked into factors that are associated with page views among eXtension’s personal finance pages (www.extension.org/personal_finance). Specifically, we utilized Google Analytics data from April 2009 and available Page Analytics numbers (http://pageanalytics.extension.org/ and http://data.extension.org/) produced by eXtension data engineers in the personal finance or Financial Security for All (FSA) Community of Practice (CoP) areas. Top pages with the highest page views per month were selected to look for similar characteristics among these webpages. At the macro level, we will be exploring relevant statistics to our CoP such as search engine utilized, top search keywords, traffic sources, traffic referral, and mobile device access. We also looked into the tendency of page hits associated with the following factors: topic (tag) , average Google search entrances per week, and age of the article. Preliminary log-level regression results show that pages with high numbers of hits tend to have more tags, not a summary of academic research, and be related to managing money in tough times. We shared result implications and limitations based on the results of this study. Besides advanced researches, personal finance academicians need to write on simple and applicable topics, as evident from top search hits (birth certificate, FICA tax, and SMART goals) and less tendencies of research summary articles to get hit. The federal Financial Literacy and Education Commission (FLEC) core competencies provide targeted knowledge and action/behavior changes, which in themselves are guidelines for writing topics. Despite being a non-profit organization, eXtension can still take advantage of pro-business properties by having course enrollment and savings as conversion goals.