Using Web Analytics Well

October 5, 2011

Are your website visitors doing what you expect them to do or what you want them to do? Are they following the path you thought they would follow when you designed your menu system? Are visitors to your digital-library page finding the link to historical photos of your city or the university’s archival images? These are some of the questions you should be able to answer by using a web analytics program.

As libraries deliver an increasing proportion of their services through the web, the need to accurately and comprehensively track the use of library websites, online resources, and services is more important than ever. Web analytics is a process through which statistics about website use are gathered and compiled electronically. An analytics program can be used as a tool to help you get to know your users—who they are, where they are coming from, and how they use your site. Having access to information about your users helps you to make appropriate decisions about your site—whether those decisions apply to major redesigns or to ongoing tweaks and minor changes reflecting shifts in customer usage or in your own current programs and services.

When you get started, concentrate on a few effective metrics for your own site and follow those statistics. As you build experience and confidence with those metrics, you will add more dimension to your analysis. Start small, as the amount of data can be overwhelming unless approached with planning. Web analytics need not become an in-house example of information overload.

The web analytics field has seen an exponential growth in the last decade. Google launched its free tool, Google Analytics, in 2006, and the field has been booming ever since. Google Analytics is an extremely popular tool among libraries, due not only to its tremendous power but also to its free availability, ease of use, flexibility, and clear reporting mechanisms. Many commercial tools also exist, including Coremetrics, Adobe’s Omniture, and WebTrends. Open source tools are also available, including Piwik, which is billed as an open source alternative to Google Analytics.

As you begin to learn more about the capabilities of web analytics, you will see that a tremendous amount of data can be collected about your end users. This behind-the-scenes data collection may make many librarians uncomfortable. However, the reality is that virtually all websites collect some user data through the operation of server logs. While completely eliminating data capture is an unrealistic goal, intentionally adding a tracking tool such as Google Analytics to collect personal information about the library’s website visitors may seem to be the antithesis of our service philosophy. How can we reconcile the priority of personal privacy with the organizational need to examine website usage and statistics?

Essentially, what is important to libraries is that our users operate with complete anonymity at all times and that they also maintain ultimate control of their data. The ability to opt out of any data collection is key and should be clearly offered as an option to our website visitors. In addition, we must be thoughtful about what data to collect and how it will be used. Libraries must strike a balance between user privacy and organizational effectiveness, with the scales always tipped in favor of user choice.

KATE MAREK is a library educator, trainer, and consultant who serves as a professor at the Graduate School of Library and Information Science of Dominican University in River Forest, Illinois. This article is an excerpt from the July 2011 issue of Library Technology Reports.

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