The indefatigable Tony Hirst has an interesting post about using Google Analytics to analyse library website traffic. He looks at the Open University Library website. This is in preparation for a fuller paper he is preparing with Hassan Sheikh of the Library for Internet Librarian International 2008. Something to look forward to …. Here is a taste of the entry:
A quick glimpse suggests the search links need dumping, and more real estate should be given over to the “Journals” and “Databases” links that are currently in the left hand sidebar, and which get 20% and 19% of the click-thrus respectively. Despite the large areas of the screen given over to the image-based navigation, they aren’t pulling much traffic. (That said, if we segment the users it might well be the case that the images in the middle of the page disproportionately attract clicks from certain sorts of user? I don’t think it’s possible to segment this out in the general report, however? For that, I guess we need to define some separate reports that are pre-segmented according to referrer?)
Just chasing the traffic a little more, I wonder if there are a few, popular databases or whether traffic is distributed over all of them equally? The Library databases page is pretty horrible – a long alphabetical list of databases – so can the analytics suggests ways of helping people find the pages they want? [Library Analytics (Part 1) « OUseful.Info, the blog…]
