Hey Jim
I suspect that you'd be better off keeping your original figures but for
political rather than other reasons. In my experience the people who
usually request figures for web visits are rarely tech savvy and don't
appreciate the subtleties of online stat measurement. If you report to
DCMS then you'll probably already have done an estimate for the coming
year; you're probably not going to be a popular man if you suddenly
suggest that visits are somehow 40% lower.
For internal "web team only" use I think this is, however, a very
valuable thing to track. It lends enormous weight to the theory that
"locked-in visits" to sites, where users take some kind of well defined
path through our content, are being replaced by external searches,
embedding, content re-use. More deeply it underscores the incredible
importance of freeing our data (because people are using it like that
already, whether we like it or not), as well as having a good
understanding of SEO techniques and so on. On another level it also says
a huge amount about the importance of persistent URI's, and not just for
page-level resources, but also for assets such as images and PDF's...
At the end of the day I think there is an entire debate which should
happen between those who report and the people they report to. The
landscape of stat measurement has changed so markedly that we should
have a pooled knowledge to know *which bits* are the most meaningful:
many say that "visits" just don't do it anymore. What about the embedded
stuff you mention, time on page, RSS feed sign-ups, membership levels,
returning visits, personalization...?
Cheers
Mike
________________________________
Mike Ellis
Solutions Architect
Eduserv
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tel: 01225 474300
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www.eduserv.org.uk
-----Original Message-----
From: Museums Computer Group [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of
Jim O'Donnell
Sent: 04 January 2008 10:31
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: Measuring web site visits
Thanks very much for all your responses.
I've another question about log analysis. One of the graphs produced by
webtrends is a breakdown of visit figures by number of pages viewed. For
our sites, around 40% of the visitors view 0 pages ie. 40% of visits
download files without visiting a HTML web page. Presumably this is
requests for images on our server, embedded on other sites, or people
downloading pdfs directly via a link on google, say. We get a lot of
requests for images from myspace pages and discussion boards. There's
also a small number of subscribers to RSS feeds who don't visit the site
directly.
Should we subtract that figure when counting the number of visitors to
our site? It does include people who are using our content, just not in
the traditional manner of visiting the site and reading a web page.
Perhaps we need to look at separate services, like feedburner, to keep
track of those?
Interesting to note by the way, that if we subtract webtrends' visits
from spiders, and visits that view 0 pages, from the total visits figure
then the number you get isn't far off the number reported by google
analytics for the same period.
Jim
Jim O'Donnell
Senior Web Developer
National Maritime Museum
Park Row
Greenwich
London SE10 9NF
DDI: 020 8312 6517
Fax:
email: [log in to unmask]
P please consider the environment - do you really need to print this
email?
We are listed on everyclick.com, the search engine that helps charity.
Please go to http://www.everyclick.com/uk/nationalmaritimemuseum and set
everyclick as your home page, so you can search the web and help
National Maritime Museum. It does not cost a penny, so it's a great way
to support us every day.
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