Web Metrics Sean Fox Science Education Resource Center Carleton College

Web Metrics/Web Analytics Recording and analyzing direct computer- computer interactions that we hope reflect website use by real people. Incremental improvements on the same old ‘digging through the web logs” we did a decade ago.

Collecting the Data Web server logs –Easy to get –Only reflects actual requests to the server (which often isn’t what we really care about…) Javascript ‘Bugs’ –Records page views (window.onLoad events) –Avoids spiders –Easier to coordinate with 3rd party services

The easy numbers beg to be misinterpreted Caching. –Do you know what your headers say? Session Reconstruction and Proxies Cookies and Javascript turned off ?? It’s really not that bad. Irrelevant (to us) Use? –If a visitor figures out they are in the wrong site right away and leaves was it a successful visit? –Spiders –Web services…(what’s a user/visitor?)

There’s still value there Know what question you’re trying to ask. Integrate web metrics into overall evaluation; ask complementary questions from multiple directions. Look carefully, keeping all sources of error firmly in mind. Then look again even more carefully. Fancy packages won’t give you answers. It will take thinking and digging (perhaps in addition to a fancy package).

Examples/Ideas from SERC Is anyone visiting? Where are they coming from? What are they looking for?

Visitors to the Tsunami Page

Try the same thing for Hurricanes Katrina, Rita, and Wilma?

Looking in detail at how users move through a site The typical paths of visitors moving from topical example into pedagogic content. (Data from October and November 2004.)

Questions?