Digital Programs and Systems

Clout - The Art and Science of Influential Web Content by Colleen Jones

Coming Dec 2010!

As I prepare some preliminary data for the POP, I thought I might share the numbers I am collecting as a start to calculate what our websites cost per pageview.  So far...

Digital Systems has spent over 4000 hours supporting the public webs (Jun 2009 - Oct 2010).

This includes support for 5 websites and here are the pageview counts:

So total hours Jan - Oct 2010 = 1155 * $50/hour = $57,759

Total cost  / total pageviews =$57,759 / 3,020,780 = $0.19 per pageview

One way to look at this is that it costs the libraries almost $0.19 for every new page of content created.  Maybe it costs $0.19 for each page supported.

*Note, some hours/month are estimated. Also, cost per hour is estimated.  Another note, total hours tracked by actitime are for Digital Staff only, this count does not include web authors time.  Another another note, this measure does not include cost of hosting the websites on our servers.

More from my hero Avinash...a summary of a student's dissertation Chessie Little and the model she developed for understanding business objectives, goals, KPIs, targets and segments.  Brilliant and something I will follow as a guide as I develop KPIs for EULweb.  This post is just the crib notes from Avinash's full blog post.  I am using this as a guide for conversation with the web team that includes all folks involved in the libraries' websites.

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Identifying the business objectives mandates a discussion, multiple discussions, with the senior-most leaders in your company and working with them / sweet-talking their egos with gentle encouragement, to identify why the site exists.

Based on those discussions Chessie identified three objectives: Create awareness, generate leads for the builders and highlight community events.

Drilling down to identify Website Goals requires just a little bit more work from you, with the majority of critical thinking still coming from Management and Marketers (usually from multiple divisions – you get to know all the stakeholders if you do this!).

My definition: Goals are specific strategies you'll leverage to accomplish the business objectives.

Now that we know what the Goals are it is time to pick the Key Performance Indicators (data, data, data, finally, data!). The work balance will shift to you as you are the expert here, with Management in a guidance role.

Many would stop here. That would be wrong. And Chessie did not.

The right thing to do is resist the siren song of Google Analytics or Webtrends. You have not established what success or failure looks like, even if you have all the data.

Time to do what Chessie did: SET TARGETS!

Most often you as an Analyst will play a supporting role here, providing historical performance data etc. The decision-making will be done by your senior leadership and, if the company is big enough, the Finance and Sales teams.

People who are accountable will help you identify targets for each KPI. . .

Take 10 more minutes from the people around you — the business people, the marketers, your boss — do one more thing.

Have a discussion with them about what are the most important segments to focus on when it comes to each goal.  Not just the super lame New vs. Returning Visitors or Search vs. All or Browser Versions segments!

As I mature in web analysis and have a sense of what kind of quesitons to as the customers I'll be testing these two products recommended by my viritual mentor, Avinash...

• UserTesting.com
• Loop11.com

For $39 a pop UserTesting.com allows you to specify the demographic and other attributes of the users you are most interested in and then have those users complete tasks you specify on your site. You get a video and a written summary of their experiences. Nothing more powerful than actual frustrated users right?Read more: http://www.kaushik.net/avinash/#ixzz12oTn8kJA 

http://euclidtest1.cc.emory.edu:30322/webusage.html

 and a detail stats of a month is at:

http://euclidtest1.cc.emory.edu:30322/201008webcat.html

http://spiderman.library.emory.edu/stats/

Visits vs. Visitors

Analytics measures both visits and visitors in your account. Visits represent the number of individual sessions initiated by all the visitors to your site. If a user is inactive on your site for 30 minutes or more, any future activity will be attributed to a new session. Users that leave your site and return within 30 minutes will be counted as part of the original session. The initial session by a user during any given date range is considered to be an additional visit and an additional visitor. Any future sessions from the same user during the selected time period are counted as additional visits, but not as additional visitors.

Looking at the cumulative total of time on site, the months receiving the most time on site are April and Sept. As expected, the months with the longest time correlates to the months with the highest percentage of visitors.

Many users return to the library around 180 days after their first visit. I attribute this timing to the beginning of the semester. Thus, comparing January and August, there was a slight reduction in cumulative time on site, but further analysis is required to determine if this is a significant reduction.

And of all that time spent on the site, the homepage and database pages keeps users on the page the longest. Of course further segmentation of the visitor population is required to analyze further.

The ETD site will be down for maintenance from 8pm this evening until 8am tomorrow morning.  We apologize for the inconvenience.