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Hitwise Intelligence - Robin Goad - UK

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Students flock to ucas.co.uk and social networks following exam results

August 17, 2007

A-Level results were released yesterday with all the usual fanfare and criticism. Unsurprisingly, visits to ucas.co.uk - the homepage of the organization that administers university admissions - shot up as students went online to confirm their university places, or, in the case of the unlucky few, find a new place via the clearing system. Ucas.co.uk was the 37th most popular site overall yesterday, and the second most popular education website behind Wikipedia.

Daily visits to ucas.co.uk

Ucas.co.uk’s overall ranking was the same yesterday as results day last year, but the way that students are navigating to and from education websites has changed. Social networks are playing an increasingly important role, and our Net Communities and Chat category is now the largest source of upstream traffic to ucas.co.uk after Search Engines. The impact on downstream traffic is even greater, with over 15% of users visiting a Net communities and Chat website after ucas.co.uk, presumably to discuss their results with friends and family. For the Education category overall, Net Communities and Chat had a 56% greater impact on upstream traffic this year than last, and accounted for 90% more downstream traffic.

For the first time this year, a group of students were given the opportunity to view their exam results online rather than go to their school or wait nervously for the postman to deliver the (hopefully) good news. The experiment was obviously popular, as Edexcel, the exam board that ran the trials, saw a significant increase in traffic to both its homepage and ResultsPlus, the micro site it set up to deliver the results to students and teachers. The impact of social networking was also evident here – Facebook was the second most popular site visited before ResultsPlus, accounting for 15.1% of upstream traffic.

Daily visits to Edexcel’s homepage and exam results service