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Producing Online Heritage Projects

4. Product Maintenance

4.4 Statistics Analysis

Monitor the traffic to your Web pages to determine the popularity of your online product and its individual sections. This involves requesting detailed statistics from your Web host. Refer to Figure 16, Statistics Definitions for Online Products, which defines the terms used to gather information about the popularity of your online product.

Figure 16: Statistics Definitions for Online Products

Term	Definition and description
Hits	The retrieval of any item, such as a page or a graphic ³⁸, from a Web server. For example, when a user calls up a Web page with four graphics, that results in five hits, one for the page and four for the graphics. Saying there were "56 hits" on a page means that there were 56 separate requests. Once a leading metric, hits are now generally considered unreliable as a measurement method for Web use because a single graphic-heavy Web page might measure 100 or more hits every time it is accessed. ³⁹
Page Views (a.k.a. Page Impression)	Describes how Web pages are accessed. A page view differs from a hit because it counts only the number of times a page has been accessed in its entirety; whereas a hit counts the number of times any elements in a page, including graphics, have been accessed. ⁴⁰ IIn other words, the page view is a count of the number of times Web pages are presented to visitors. Home pages generally get more page views than other Web pages. It is important to note that page views have become more difficult to gauge, since frames divide pages into separate sections.
Visit	A visit normally corresponds to a single person moving through your online product. Reporting software that tracks and counts Web traffic can measure the number of visits. A visit is defined as a sequence of requests to a Web server, all made from the same Internet Protocol (IP) address, having the same agent string, and with no gap between requests of more than 15 consecutive minutes. So, if a user accesses your content and starts clicking through it, this is counted as a visit. Say, for example, the user's browser becomes idle for more than 15 consecutive minutes, either because the user received a phone call or was interrupted by something and momentarily stopped clicking through your Web product (sending requests to the Web server). If that user resumes clicking through your product after this 15 minute-plus break, this new sequence of requests is counted as a second visit.
Visitor (a.k.a. Unique Host and/or Unique Visitor)	Reporting software that tracks and counts Web traffic can also identify how many "unique visitors" visited the site during a fixed time frame, typically a 30-day period. Unique visitors are measured according to their unique IP addresses (which are like online fingerprints) and are counted only once within a defined time period, no matter how many times they visit. ⁴¹ This method of reporting is limited in its accuracy as many IP addresses are assigned dynamically. This means that one person could have a different IP address each time they visit.
Sources	Definitions used in CHIN's Web site reporting software called Summary.