A comparative web-traffic analysis of three renowned wildlife conservation organisations - International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN), Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS) and World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF)
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.11609/jott.10072.18.6.29067-29078Keywords:
Audience engagement, communication strategy, International Union for Conservation of Nature, web analytics, websites, wildlife conservation, Wildlife Conservation Society, World Wide Fund for NatureAbstract
The International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN), Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS), and World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF) are among the leading wildlife organisations that provide significant scientific information. These organisations, through their highly data-centric and interactive websites, communicate conservation and have been accessed by an audience base across the globe. Each part of the world encounters a diverse range of conservation-related issues. Analysing the communication strategies of each of these websites can provide key insights into the domain of wildlife conservation pedagogy. This study is based on quantitative web analytics utilising web tools and software that provide insights such as attributes and visual portraits on the engagement of the audience of these websites, trending search topics, audience engagement, learning behaviours, website performance, user behaviour analysis, and communication strategies. WWF recorded the highest monthly visits (≈ 1.56 million) but the highest bounce rate (68.63%), whereas IUCN recorded the longest mean visit duration (2 min 21 s). The findings describe how the three organisations’ publicly reported web-traffic profiles differ in audience geography, search-term composition, social-referral mix and engagement metrics and discuss the limits of inferring audience intent from aggregate analytics.
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