When was the last time you looked at your
web stats? Many museums and galleries are not aware
that they have access to statistics and analytics for
their web sites. Every web server maintains statistics
in some form or other, and most of them will be running
software that changes the arcane log files into meaningful
information.
Through web statistics, you can identify high traffic
areas of a web site, find out where visitors are coming
from, and see how long they spend. But the first thing
everyone wants to know: how many people are actually
visiting my site?
It is important to note the difference between "hits"
and "visitors" (or "sessions").
A "hit" is registered for each and every resource
that is accessed on the site; if a page has 4 images
on it, 5 "hits" are recorded (1 for the page
itself, and 4 for each of the images). Talking about
how many "hits" a web site gets in a month
is not a very meaningful statistic, what most people
are really interested in is how many "visitors"
or "sessions" they have recorded.
A "visit" is generally defined as one or more
transactions between the Web server and a specific IP
Address (every computer on the internet has a unique
identifier, or IP address). A session will expire after
a certain amount of inactivity (usually 15 minutes).
This means that if I visit a web site twice in a week,
it will register as two separate visits; if I follow
an external link off of a site, but then go back to
the site shortly after, it will probably be a continuation
of the same visit.
Though usually the most requested statistic, the number
of visitors is just one thing you can learn from your
web analytics. While "number of visitors"
may be a great justifier for the site, or leveraged
for funding, many of the other statistics are more functional
on a day to day basis, as they give you hints on how
to tune your site.
Page views, for example, show you which pages on your
site are being requested the most. Is it a page that
is buried, but people are still finding it somehow?
Is it a page that should have timely information, but
that hasn't been updated in weeks (or months)? Maybe
it's time to rethink the navigation on the site to make
these popular pages easier to find? Usually we assume
that our main page is the one that is visited the most,
sometimes this isn’t the case.
Your stats can also show how long people are spending
on your site. A little advice: don't get discouraged!
It may seem that an average session time of one or two
minutes is very low, but many visitors are coming to
your site to find specific information, not to spend
an afternoon. In any given month, the Art Gallery of
Greater Victoria website will have only about 15% of
its visitors spend more than 2 minutes each and, hey,
we're ok with that! We also get a few hundred people
a month at the other end of the scale, spending 30 minutes
or more on the site.
Finally, some analytical packages such as Livestats
(www.deepmetrix.com) allow you to view who is currently
on your site, and to track progress through their "click
path". If they are having trouble getting from
a to b, you can see this in their session, and address
it. If many visitors are following the same route (eg.
Home page -> current exhibits -> exit) you can
think about adding enticements to other parts of your
site in a prominent location along their typical route.
Ultimately, statistics can be interesting to browse
and can provide a sense of satisfaction when your web
site is drawing many visitors, but are at their most
valuable when their information is used to repair problems
and increase the overall visitor experience.
Jonathan Lathigee (jonathan@zeroonedesign.com) is
a geek, a partner in Victoria-based internet development
company Zero One Design Inc. (www.zeroonedesign.com),
and the I.T. Administrator at the Art Gallery of Greater
Victoria (aggv.bc.ca)