Reporting Web usage: what numbers do you use?

K.G. Schneider kgs at bluehighways.com
Mon Oct 25 14:12:47 EDT 2004


We are moving to new statistical programs for Librarians' Index, and as we
do so we are also reassessing what it is we measure and report. I'd
particularly like to hear from organizations that have users on public
computers and reference librarians that repeatedly use the same sites all
day. 

Historically we have used total requests to server (what WUSAGE calls
"accesses"), less some file types such as graphic images. (This was using
WUSAGE.) Now we are exploring AWSTATS, and we have several options:

Unique visitors
Number of visits
Pages
Hits 
Bandwidth

I'm reasonably familiar with the definitions of these terms and the caveats
associated with them, so for now I'll hold off on the ramifications of what
a "visitor" means on a public workstation and the configuration requirements
that suggests. But I am interested in a nose count. What do you report, and
why?

Karen G. Schneider
Librarians' Index to the Internet
http://lii.org kgs at lii.org





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