Holiday Data Snapshot

Brian Hughes — Sat, 15 Jan 2011 03:11:52 +0000

I was browsing our site analytics today and I thought it’d be fun to share a little snippet of data. Here is a table with information on pageviews over the past month (12/14/2010 to 1/13/2011), by author:

Analysis

Now, our Pressible publishing project isn’t a contest, but… it’s kind of fun to see how different content performs. I went into Google Analytics to see how our Check it Out! category of posts was performing. Though this particular snapshot doesn’t help one fully understand that, knowing which categories these authors usually contribute to allows me to infer that Check it Out! is doing pretty well.

For example, Melissa (melissac), Ruaridh (roderick), Riley (cjr2142), and Victoria (victorialebron) often post to Check it Out! Jennifer (govan) and Allen (refman) have their own unique contributions – on library offerings, the education program, and other reflective posts. Michelle (michellem) has been introducing library staff, and Gary (garynatriello) has created one post announcing the 2010 Strage Prize.

So it turns out that readership of Check it Out! represents about 20% of the site’s overall traffic. Pretty cool! Now we could drill down further and look at where the traffic is coming from (and if, for example, it comes from “related content” links elsewhere on the Pressible network)… but I’m going to go watch a movie now.

Methods

I did a “Content Drilldown” in Google Analytics, selecting for the entire Learning at the Library site over the past month. The “Site Totals” in the above graphic refer to the Pressible Network. Also, one should note that these figures represent views of any of the site’s content, and not just content created in the past month.

Also, I did not distinguish between internal and external traffic here – meaning that the overall numbers include traffic from the authors of the site. A more thorough analysis would clarify exactly how true visitors view our site, which may be different from everyone together.

And one last thing…

It’s fun to browse this kind of information (and I’ve recently been seeing a lot of predictions that I need to become a “data junkie” to continually refine my understanding of the digital universe). I think it would be fun to give all library staff access to our Google Analytics account – and this will be easier once we fully adopt the new Google Apps for Education in the library. Stay tuned!

Learning at the Library » analysis

Holiday Data Snapshot

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