Site Stats

On this page you can see

• Bolton Museum's Web visitor figures for 2007 and 2008 (up to October)
• Google Analytics benchmarking data for Bolton Museums (April to September 2008)
• Explanations of what these data mean
  

Site or web statistics give us a great deal of infomation about how our users access and use our web services. Though this data is completely anonymous it still gives us useful information.

For instance it tells us:

• How many visitors we get
• What key phrases people use to find us in search engines
  
• What terms they use to search the site itself
  
• The average number of pages visitors access
• How many pages are accessed altogether
• What browsers people use

and so on.

The stats don't just tell us how popular a site is. We can also use this information to work out if there are problems with the way the site is laid out; can people find our visitor or events information easily, for example?

Our web stats

To analyse boltonmuseums.org.uk's web stats we use two software packages which are:

• Awstats (used since the current site was launched in April 2007)
• Google Analytics (used since April 2008)

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Awstats figures for 2007 (starting in March)

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Awstats figures for 2008 (to end of October)

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What does Awstats tell us?

Unique visitors

This figure attempts to measure individual visits to a site. If one person were to visit a site once in a day and another were to visit the same site five times that would still only count as 2 unique visits. In some quarters this is relied upon as being the most reprentative web visitor figure but for many reasons this should to be regarded with suspicion. For instance, in the hypothetical example above the person who visited our site five times could have just as easily been five different people using the same computer (there is no way of counting visits by actual people).

Visits

Visits are also known as sessions. This treats each visit to the site as being significant. So, in the hypothetical example above it wouldn't matter if one visitor had been to the site five times or five people had used the same computer on the same day. What is important is that the goal of each visit is achieved effectively. The usability and effectiveness of the site becomes a much more significant factor if you concentrate on visits or sessions.

Pages

This counts the number of web addresses or URLs that are accessed within our site.

Hits

A web page is made up of lots of different parts or files. Every time you open a page that has two images on it then each image counts as a hit. A while ago hits were erroneously used as a means of measuring web usage. If your site had a hundred images on one page then at one time you could get some pretty impressive web usage figures. Pages are the more representative figure in this instance. If your site is getting a huge number of hits it could be that it might need some optimisation to cut down on bandwidth (which bumps up your hosting costs!).

Bandwidth

This measures the rate of data flow or how much information is being passed from our site. In this case you are given the monthly figure.

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Google Analytics benchmarking

Google Analytics allows us to compare our site's performance with other sites in our sector (they have to be using GA and agree to submit their figures too).

The following images are graphs showing boltonmuseums.org.uk measured against various criteria compared with the average for other Libraries and Museums sites of a similar size for the period from April 27th '08 to September 15th '08

The total number of unique visits recorded for the period:

• 16.17% above average
  

The total number of page views recorded for the period:

• 74.26% above average
  

The average number of page views per visit recorded for the period:

• 50.01% above average
  

The average time spent on the site per visit for the recorded period:

• 17.10% above average
  

The bounce rate for the recorded period:

• 6.65% below average
  

The number of new visits for the recorded period:

• 56.67% above average

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What do these benchmarking figures tell us?

Visits

The Google Analytics results significantly above average. as well as this Awstats results above show a five fold increase in visits since the site was launched in April 2008

Page views

The number of page views for the site have always been slightly higher than average but the inclusion of the image search at the end of July 2008 saw a drastic increase in page views prompted by the launch of the collections search. This has a great deal of browsable content that encourages people to view more content as well as attracting  more visitors via search engines.

Average pages per visit

Again this has always been significantly higher than average but people are viewing far more pages now that they can search the collections on line. A high figure can ironically be a poor indicator. For example, people who find your site difficult to navigate may open more pages trying to find what they need.

An accessible site means that users have to make fewer clicks to get what they want. In Bolton Museum's case ther is a split in the way users access the site. People who want visitor information generally only visit 2 to 3 pages implying that they find the information they need very quickly. People who browse the collections section of the site spend more time and in some instances access over 100 pages.

Average time on site

This has been modestly higher than on other similar sites though there has been a visible increase in tim espent on the site per user after the launch of the collections search.

Bounce rate

Bounce rate is the percentage of visits to the site that result in only one page view (generally driven by search engine users). The figure here is slightly lower implying that the site has more "stickability" than others. There is some debate over what these figures mean.

A high bounce rate would suggest that people are leaving your site quickly because it isn't relevant or simply not very good! Alternatively it could mean that people are finding exactly what they need via search engines and don't need to navigate your site any further before leaving. The steady increase in visitors would suggest that the bounce rate isn't anything to be worried about for now.

New visits

This figure has remained constant for a long period now and is significantly higher than similar sized sites in our sector. This would suggest that the site is performing well in search engines.

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