Online visibility – A new aspect of measuring the performance of Hungarian higher education institutions

Abstract

In recent years, the role of the online presence of higher education institutions has greatly increased, since a huge part of their target audience is an active user of various web interfaces. As a result, measuring online institutional performance has become increasingly popular in the international literature and in higher education rankings as well. The purpose of this paper is to comprehensively describe the performance of the online platforms of Hungarian higher education institutions and to present a system of criteria for measuring institutional performance based on international literature. We analysed the traffic and backlinks of university websites, as well as their performance on social media platforms. Based on the data from 10 indicators, we created an index capturing overall online performance and a positioning index using principal component analysis. Our results show that there is a strong correlation between the indicators capturing online performance and traditional university rankings. Furthermore, we found that institutions with a higher number of students perform orders of magnitude better according to the measured indicators, suggesting their strong size dependence.