Collecting Stats.

[George Porter]

Dan Lester has some excellent standard categories of statistics.  Among the
most important, day in and day out, is the browser breakdown.  As many
people have observed, the brand and version of browser used by your
clientele can have a profound impact on the services you deliver, as opposed
to the services you are trying to offer. 

We do a couple of additional analyses at Caltech that can be helpful. We
separate out, by IP range, library workstations from the rest of campus.
The library's website is the default home page for browsers on public
workstations.  It is very instructive to look at the behaviors of the campus
community without the bias of hits from every time a web browser is launched
in the library.  Since the Jet Propulsion Laboratory is managed by Caltech,
we also view them as a significant portion of our target audience.  We break
out usage from the JPL domain, too.  

The analyses we do are primarily for the edification of the content
developers.  On the basis of observed link trails we added a number of
resources to our main page during a redesign last spring.  Many of the
resources were selected on the basis of observed multi-click paths, repeated
ad nauseum in the web logs.

George S. Porter
Sherman Fairchild Library of Engineering & Applied Science
California Institute of Technology
Mail Code 1-43, Pasadena, CA  91125
Telephone (626) 395-3409 Fax (626) 431-2681