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

[K.G. Schneider]

I responded off-list to Sarah's quick response, but really could post the
same follow-up on-list. 

In this query I'm really looking at the number(s) used for a regular (say
monthly or quarterly) "body count," i.e. the rough numbers used to indicate
how much total usage the site gets. The rest, yes, worth discussion, but my
eyes are on the aggregate pot o' numbers. 

My questions come for two reasons. One, I am interested in identifying what
most people report so that at least within the library community we are not
each speaking in our own institutional languages--the "lingua franca" issue.
The other is to generate some discussion about *why* you use what you use.
In particular, I have found that statistical packages often have wildly
variant rules about what a "user session" is. I think we would all ideally
like to report visits in most cases, but I have a bad feeling that across
the board these are so subject to interpretation that they are only useful
internally, and only when the statistical package is able to accommodate
such phenomena as a public access computer with a variety of "visitors" all
logged in to the same account.  And yet how interesting it would be to have
guidelines and recommended practices so that we did all produce generally
analogous information.

Others? 

Karen G. Schneider
kgs at bluehighways.com