Reporting Web usage: what numbers do you use?

[Elena OMalley]

First off, for Sarah Houghton: 
If you are a WebTrends administrator, you can increase the number of top pages 
viewed by selecting the profile, choosing edit, then selecting the reports tab. 
The parameter that controls the number of pages reported is 
"Maximum number of elements available in report tables (1 - 99999)." 

This should increase the number reported in the future for Top Pages and some 
of the other reports. Be careful about making this number more than your setup 
can comfortably crunch. (I may be entirely misunderstanding your comment, but 
I hope it's useful info for someone. It took me some digging to find it when we 
set up WebTrends.) 

On the general subject of nose counts and counting: 
If we fight so hard to preserve people's privacy and anonymity while web surfing 
in our libraries, it should come as no surprise or disappointment that we have 
difficulty tracking things like real nose counts. 

That said, we use page visits and page views and compare over the years. 
Day of week and time of day traffic helps determine when's a good time to perform 
server maintenance. I try to get a decent estimate of off vs on campus traffic and 
a rough idea of library vs non-library on campus traffic, but we don't make 
decisions based on that data so I'm not concerned about the lack of precision. 

While the concept of a universal web counting scheme is alluring, I figure we 
have to interpret those numbers within our own situations anyway. For the money
decisions, I'm hoping Project Counter and similar initiatives make a lot of headway.

Elena O'Malley
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Elena O'Malley, Head of Library Computer and Internet Services
Emerson College Library, Boston, MA 02116