[MCN-L] Website benchmarking
hi nik and others i should weigh in here. i'm actually talking about this at MW08 in a few weeks. web analytics are a nightmare if you are trying to get any clarity out of absolute figures. matt, nik and others are right - the trends are what matters. however . . . page tagging solutions *don't* count bots and spiders (as they don't execute javascript). log file solutions suffer from bots and spider traffic (as well as counting every single RSS refresh etc) we've found the best option at the Powerhouse is to use a combination of approaches depending on what we are trying to measure, and for whom, for comparative stats we use Hitwise which is a local ISP-level solution. we are able to measure our AUSTRALIAN traffic (not international) against other sites and industries as a percentage of total traffic. it doesn't provide X visits but instead tells me the %age of Australian traffic to the Powerhouse site as a proportion of any particular sector's overall traffic. because it measures at the ISP layer it allows me to compare against other sites and mine search data as well as where visitors go AFTER our site (interestingly a fair amount go to ebay!). Hitwise does this by buying anonymised ISP proxy logs from the major ISPs around Australia. i'd argue that at a meta-level % of total internet traffic is more useful than counting visitors . . . . internet usage fluctuates seasonally but is also always growing . . . . even if your site traffic is growing at say 20% per annum, what if overall internet traffic is growing at 25% per annum? then your site is actually going backwards in terms of 'share' i am looking forward to Google Analytics' upcoming 'comparative benchmarking' stats . . . seb Sebastian Chan Manager, Web Services Powerhouse Museum street - 500 Harris St Ultimo, NSW Australia postal - PO Box K346, Haymarket, NSW 1238 tel - 61 2 9217 0109 fax - 61 2 9217 0689 e - sebc at phm.gov.au w - www.powerhousemuseum.com -Original Message- From: mcn-l-boun...@mcn.edu on behalf of Nik Honeysett Sent: Wed 12/03/2008 8:27 AM To: Museum Computer Network Listserv Subject: Re: [MCN-L] Website benchmarking Google Analytics is a page tagging service, its accuracy will depend on you and what you want. If you have comprehensively tagged all your pages, then it will comprehensively report on your traffic, but that traffic will include bots and spiders i.e. not real people. You can filter these out - up to a point - but are real-people numbers important to you? Its unlikely that you will ever get an accurate number of real people visiting your site, so its best to accept that. Assuming, you did have an accurate number and that number suddenly doubled or halved what would you do? What would happen? In either case you would want to know why, but you're not really interested in the number, only the change. You can figure that out whether you have real-people numbers or all-inclusive numbers. Your real concern should be trends and Google Analytics is fine for this, as long as you know what you're reporting and you don't change the filtering. -nik >>> "Jeff Tancil" 3/11/2008 12:58 PM >>> That seems to beg a question: what stats service is useful? As a fairly dinky Museum, we use the best free service, GoogleAnalytics. How badly do people think that skews? -Original Message- From: mcn-l-bounces at mcn.edu [mailto:mcn-l-boun...@mcn.edu] On Behalf Of Nik Honeysett Sent: Tuesday, March 11, 2008 3:53 PM To: Museum Computer Network Listserv Subject: Re: [MCN-L] Website benchmarking Like you say, these sites are ok for trends but do not give anything close to accurate figures for traffic your numbers. -nik >>> Russ Brooks 3/11/2008 10:43 AM >>> When we noticed a shift in our web statistics we wondered if it was just our site or was it something that was affecting all other museums. We found the two following sites very useful in providing us with an opportunity to compare our performance to that of other museums. http://www.alexa.com/ http://www.compete.com/ These two sites allowed us to see the exact same patterns in traffic affecting nearly all other museums. These sites can also be useful when trying to determine Internet usage trends. Is Facebook still hot? Type in their address and you can see the results. On 3/11/08 1:26 PM, "Leonard Steinbach" wrote: > I was wondering whether anyone uses any particular web traffic statistics to > compare the performance of their website to the websites of other museums. > In effect is anyone benchmarking their website against others, or know of > any studies or papers which address this issue? > > Thanks > ___ > You are currently subscribed to mcn-l, the listserv of the Museum Computer > Network (http://www.mcn.edu) > > To post to this list, send messages to: mcn-l at mcn.edu > > To unsubscribe or change mcn-l delivery options visit: > http://toronto.mediatrope
[MCN-L] Website benchmarking
Hi there, We are trying to answer some of these questions at the London Museum Hub. The Hub is a consortium of four museums funded by Government, and we are trying to take a more strategic approach to collecting and using stats in a more joined-up way. The work's still ongoing, but initial findings support the view that even among four organisations it's very difficult to share like with like. Each museum collects and uses the data in different ways, and even within a single organisation the picture is often quite varied depending on the number of micro-sites, online collections etc. Overall though, the challenges tend to be organisational rather than technical. In general, the conclusion we're arriving at is: more detail = less ability to share consistently. It also comes down to how you plan to use the stats. A two-tier approach is emerging for us. Stats for reporting to stakeholders (funding bodies, senior management etc) for the purposes of impact advocacy, evidence gathering and so on will tend to be pretty simple. This will mean we can more confidently identify trends across the consortium of museums and will give us some nice headline political messages that other people will easily understand. The second level is more detailed data about usage of individual sites that can inform planning at an organisational or project level. We're finding that this does not lend itself well to comparisons, because it tends to be more tied in with the design and structure of individual sites. As a result of the work we've commissioned this year we are hoping to develop a Hub-wide framework for collecting and using this data. The plan is that each of the Hub partners can sign up to this framework and start collecting data in a more consistent way, which will mean the Hub can use the evidence more strategically. We'll have to support this with funding for training & systems to enable the partners to participate. Ultimately we want a better idea of the impact that our collective online offerings are having on end users, and this work forms one facet of this. We've found that it's important to take a more qualitative approach as well, so we're also producing a Hub framework for online audience research which will complement the statistical. Once we have the results we will publish the findings in some form, so I'll keep you posted... Cheers, Dylan Dylan Edgar London Hub ICT Development Officer London Transport Museum 39 Wellington Street London WC2E 7BB Direct line: 07711 148133 Email: dylan.edgar at ltmuseum.co.uk -Original Message- From: mcn-l-bounces at mcn.edu [mailto:mcn-l-boun...@mcn.edu] On Behalf Of Chan, Sebastian Sent: 12 March 2008 10:49 To: Museum Computer Network Listserv Subject: Re: [MCN-L] Website benchmarking hi nik and others i should weigh in here. i'm actually talking about this at MW08 in a few weeks. web analytics are a nightmare if you are trying to get any clarity out of absolute figures. matt, nik and others are right - the trends are what matters. however . . . page tagging solutions *don't* count bots and spiders (as they don't execute javascript). log file solutions suffer from bots and spider traffic (as well as counting every single RSS refresh etc) we've found the best option at the Powerhouse is to use a combination of approaches depending on what we are trying to measure, and for whom, for comparative stats we use Hitwise which is a local ISP-level solution. we are able to measure our AUSTRALIAN traffic (not international) against other sites and industries as a percentage of total traffic. it doesn't provide X visits but instead tells me the %age of Australian traffic to the Powerhouse site as a proportion of any particular sector's overall traffic. because it measures at the ISP layer it allows me to compare against other sites and mine search data as well as where visitors go AFTER our site (interestingly a fair amount go to ebay!). Hitwise does this by buying anonymised ISP proxy logs from the major ISPs around Australia. i'd argue that at a meta-level % of total internet traffic is more useful than counting visitors . . . . internet usage fluctuates seasonally but is also always growing . . . . even if your site traffic is growing at say 20% per annum, what if overall internet traffic is growing at 25% per annum? then your site is actually going backwards in terms of 'share' i am looking forward to Google Analytics' upcoming 'comparative benchmarking' stats . . . seb Sebastian Chan Manager, Web Services Powerhouse Museum street - 500 Harris St Ultimo, NSW Australia postal - PO Box K346, Haymarket, NSW 1238 tel - 61 2 9217 0109 fax - 61 2 9217 0689 e - sebc at phm.gov.au w - www.powerhousemuseum.com -Original Message- From: mcn-l-boun...@mcn.edu on behalf of Nik Honeysett Sent: Wed 12/03/2008 8:27 AM To: Museum Computer Network Listserv Subject: Re: [MCN-L] Website benchmarking Google Analytics is a page tagging service, i
