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Website Counters
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Website Counters
7:39 PM EST 12/6/06
We would like to find out if anyone has had experience with adding a free website counter to your homepage. We want to add one but need some reliable feedback first - both favorable and not so favorable. Thanks very much.
Re: Website Counters
8:45 PM EST 12/6/06 as a reply to Archived Member.
I've never used one (within the last 5 or 6 years, at least) but I have a friend who uses hitcounter.com and likes it. Most web hosts will provide your stats (and usually a program to analyze them), though and that may be enough for you. The free website counters are less than reliable, from what I recall. Another option (if they are taking new "customers") is Google Analytics (http://www.google.com/analytics/). They bought Urchin - a nice web log analyzer - and made it available. They had so many people sign up that they stopped taking new sites for a while, but they might be opening it back up.
Re: Website Counters
10:04 AM EST 1/10/07 as a reply to Archived Member.
We here at Portsmouth Public Library in Virginia use Statcounter, we think it is great, the free version only shows last 100 page counts, but for minimal fee ($9 monthly) you can get the last 1000 pages I think, but you still get the stats, I have the free version and keep it in monthly view, I can see where the visitors came from, how long they were on my pages, return visits, what web browser they used and many other stats the web address is http://www.statcounter.com/ Thanks,
Maria
Re: Website Counters
4:44 PM EST 12/14/07 as a reply to Archived Member.
I'm going to revive this discussion for this week's [url /forums/thread.jspa?threadID=7513]Question of the Week[/url]

How are you measuring website traffic? How do you know what, when and how people use your library’s website?

I’ve been seeing lots of discussion about website analytics lately and questions about the tools used to measure site traffic and usage. Here’s a sampling of some recent posts/research in the biblioblogosphere about the topic:

[url http://babyboomerlibrarian.blogspot.com/2006/05/google-analytics.html]Baby Boomer Librarian[/url]

[url http://www.webpages.uidaho.edu/~mbolin/fang.htm]Using Google Analytics for Improving Library Website Content and Design: A Case Study[/url]

[url http://vielmetti.typepad.com/superpatron/2007/12/google-analytic.html]Super Patron[/url]

[url http://orweblog.oclc.org/archives/001475.html]Lorcan Dempsey[/url]

[url http://blogs.open.ac.uk/Maths/ajh59/011192.html]OUseful Info[/url]

[url http://scls.typepad.com/wicked_cool/google_analytics/index.html]South Central Library System's Wicked Cool[/url]

How are you approaching analytics for your library’s website?

Post your comments here or in [url http://blog.webjunctionworks.org/index.php/2007/12/14/question-of-the-week-website-analytics/]BlogJunction[/url]
Re: Website Counters
4:00 PM EST 12/20/07 as a reply to Jennifer Peterson.
At NSLS, we use Google Analytics, which we (I) think is awesome, and we're not even using the advanced features like the conversion rates and defined funnels. But it's nice to be able to generate date-range specific reports and comparisons on the fly. With that in mind, I try to compare the site's traffic relatively and not absolutely. ("Article 1 has 50% more visits than Article 2" rather than "Our articles section had x number of visitors. Is that a lot?") and I try to consider user interaction (comments, emails, survey completions) too. As a library system, we might provide information that's only of interest to a very small number of users, but to them, it's very important.

Also, having portions of your content available in RSS really throws traditional stat counting on its ear. The feed will get hit repeatedly as long as someone has it in their aggregator, but there's no way to be sure if they're even looking at it.