Results from Attending PAG

First off, some basic metrics. We saw the following compared to the previous week:

•  17.31% increase in users (427 over 364)
•  20.36% increase in new users (402 over 334)
•  26.10% increase in new sessions (517 over 410)
•  60.05% increase in page views (1282 vs 801)
•  10.14% decrease in bounce rate from any give page

So this means we were gaining new users who were checking out more on our page that users were the previous week. This tracks with the couple of new projects we picked up while at the conference!

We saw a spike of users during the first talk at PAG, which was on the first main day of the conference. We were talking about the transcriptome assembly pipeline and that talk resulted in the largest single spike of users we’ve seen in a long time! We also saw a pretty reasonable spike in users during our poster sessions and our very end of the conference talk on some of our microbiome resources.

Fig 1: Unique pageviews during PAG 2019.  The spike at 2:30 PM on Jan 12 is our first talk on the transcriptome pipeline, followed by upticks around 11am on Jan 14 through Jan 16 (poster sessions) and our microbiome talk at 11am on Jan 16.

We dug in a bit further to look at things we specifically mentioned in our talks, and found the following:

•  58% increase in number of landings to our home page
•  125% increase in number of landings on our workshop page (our first talk mentioned our upcoming workshops on transcriptome assembly*)
•  500% increase in number of landings on our transcriptome pipeline welcome page (our first talk was about our pipeline)

*stay tuned – we’re opening up registration next week!

As far as who was finding us we saw a 16% spike in US users, but a 31% spike (N=25) in UK users – likely coming from our active Twitter account (@ncgas). We had a 275% (15 over 4) increase in traffic from twitter, so it’s highly likely that our reach was expanding as a result of not just the conference, but social media. Though our local reach was increasing as well, with a 1100% increase in users logging in from San Diego area as compared to previousweek.

Fig 2: Users by city – A clear increase in our traffic from the PAG conference!

Take Home Message

Thank you all for supporting us while we do our best to support you! PAG 2019 was clearly helpful for us to all attend. However, we realize this is a pretty expensive conference, and it is difficult for a lot of our community to attend. This means you may miss out on not only the exposure we clearly benefitted from, but also all the new cutting-edge science presented at this really amazing meeting.

So we are doing two things to help mitigate these problems:

1) We are making an effort to present more client collaborations at such meetings. This year, we presented posters from collaborators with whom we have been working with over the last year. All in all, our two posters represented:

•  10 authors (6 non-NCGAS)
•  2 countries
•  2 states
•  4 institutions

If you are interested in future collaborations, feel free to email us at help@ncgas.org!
2) We are doing what we can to make what we learned publicly available to our community – through this very blog! Most of the talks are not recorded, however we will be synthesizing information for our readers. Thus far we have the following blogs planned:

• An update on third-generation sequencing technology as it relates to sequencing genomes (link here)
• An update on microbiome/metagenomics (link here)
• A summary of cool talks we saw with links to abstracts, so you can follow up if you are interested! We are also going to see if we can find some of the recorded talks to share (link here)

So stay tuned!