[WEB4LIB] Reporting Web usage: what numbers do you use?

[Houghton, Sarah]

I run the Marin County Free Library website (http://co.marin.ca.us/library), and we use WebTrends as our stat-source.  There is so much data available to me through this system, but what I report to staff in a two-page report each month includes:

# of visits (including average # of visits per day)
# of unique visitors (including a break-down of one-time vs. repeat visitors)
# top ten viewed pages by # of visits (would love to expand this to report more)
visits of weekdays vs. on weekend days
top 5 referring sites
top 10 search engines used to find us
top 10 search phrases people use to find us

I also include other interesting tidbits as I come across them in the reports (e.g. geographic distribution of our visitors, # of times our online forms have been used, the # of oral history clips listened to, if there were any server problems, etc.).

Good luck!
Sarah Houghton
e-Services Librarian, Marin County Free Library
AKA The Librarian in Black (http://www.librarianinblack.net)

-----Original Message-----
From: K.G. Schneider [mailto:kgs at bluehighways.com]
Sent: Monday, October 25, 2004 11:18 AM
To: Multiple recipients of list
Subject: [WEB4LIB] Reporting Web usage: what numbers do you use?


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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