Perhaps you’ve taken the plunge—taken Web design and programming courses, organized a departmental Web site, and labored for hours and hours over your own site or hired someone to do it. After such an effort, it would be useful to know how the site is being accessed and viewed. Particularly in a departmental website, understanding what pages are most valuable to users could help to improve services and presence on the World Wide Web. For any site, these questions are vital:
- How heavily is this site used?
- Is the usage growing or falling?
- What are the most popular pages?
- Is important information here?
- Is it being read?
- Can users make sense of the site?
- Is the site navigation working?
- When in the day is the site used? What pages bring the most traffic?
Fortunately, a Web statistics capability is available to NAU faculty and staff through ITS, called Web Statistics. It is available through a user-friendly interface starting at webstats.ucc.nau.edu. There you will find explanations of the capabilities available and an easy guide to set up your own statistics collection.
Data reports available include:
- # of visits and # of unique visits
- Monthly and daily trend graphs
- Visits duration and last visits
- Days of week and rush hours (pages, hits, KB for each hour and day of week)
- Domains/Countries of hosts visitors (pages, hits, KB)
- Hosts list, last visits, and unresolved IP addresses list
- Most viewed, entry, and exit page
- Referring pages
- File types
- OS used (pages, hits, KB for each browser, each version)
- Browsers used (pages, hits, KB for each browser, each version)
- Visits of robots
- Worm attacks
- Search engines, keyphrases, keywords used to find your site
- HTTP errors
- URL parameters
Averages and totals are available as well, and bar charts give graphics for the data to aid in determining trends. This information can help an author refine a site to attract and serve visitors.
Why wait? A few minutes spent at webstats.ucc.nau.edu could tell you far more than you can imagine about your site and perhaps where best to spend time refining it or developing new sites. That’s real Web power.
-Don Olson
