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

[Houghton, Sarah]

Unfortunately, I am not the Web Trends administrator.  Our website is part of the County's website since we are a County library system.  Working within this confining structure brings its own challenges and problems, some of which I'm speaking about during the Webmasters Roundtable at the Internet Librarian Conference next month.  But that's a discussion for another day...

I can see the top 200 pages, which I read through each month.  I just report the top ten to our staff (for statistics digestability).  As you suggest, the reason for the administrator (someone in the County's Information Services & Technology Department) choosing to only show 200 is not to drain system resources.

As for hits vs. visits, I think that hits have their own problems.  At least with our system, hits count not only hits on actual pages (.cfm, .html, .asp) but any file request: images, video & audio files, etc.  Because many of our pages are complicated and loaded with multiple files, a single web page view can result in dozens of hits.  As such, a view of our homepage (http://www.co.marin.ca.us/library) would result in about two dozen hits, while a view of our "Ask Us" page (http://www.co.marin.ca.us/library/ask.cfm) only results in about 4 hits.  So, even though visits have their own problems, to me, they at least show a more representative measure of activity on our site.  Hits are good for showing the load on the server, but for measuring site activity, I'll take visits any day.

Sarah Houghton


-----Original Message-----
From: Elena OMalley [mailto:Elena_OMalley at emerson.edu]
Sent: Wednesday, October 27, 2004 9:07 AM
To: Multiple recipients of list
Subject: [WEB4LIB] RE: Reporting Web usage: what numbers do you use?


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




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