Requirements for Library of Congress Web Analytics


Introduction

Systematic analysis of Web site usage, performance, and customer satisfaction is essential to determining how well we our serving our users and to the success of the Library of Congress Web presence.

 

Web analytics are crucial in evaluating existing services, developing and prioritizing new services, assessing the effectiveness of marketing efforts, establishing user profiles, and producing a superior user experience.

 

Management Structure

-          Manage applications

-          Manage staff

-          Manage requests for statistics

-          Manage publication/release of statistics

-          Manage statistics for content areas

-          Ensure that new content is in the statistics pipeline

-          Ensure that statistics will play a role in determining success of marketing initiatives


Reporting Structure

-          Who receives regular reports/updates?

-          What statistics should be published on the LC public site?

-          What statistics should be available on the intranet?



Reporting Requirements

Reports should be available on demand in a variety of outputs.Viewing statistics at one point in time, over a range of time periods, and real-time should be possible.The development of customized reports should be enabled (e.g. cross-referencing data such as length of visit and visitors not accepting cookies).

 


Required Statistics by Category

The following statistics should be available for the entire LC site and for designated content groups or sub-sites.Requirements for personalization features have been omitted.These features will require additional capabilities depending on our implementation.

 

Visitors:

-          Unique visitors

-          Visitors who visited once, more than once in a day, week, month, year

-          Top visitors

-          Recency of visits

-          Latency of visits

-          Top organizations

-          Top countries

-          Trends, including how many times users visited the site combined with how long they stayed

-          Browsers, browsers by version

-          Visitors not accepting cookies

-          Platforms

-          Domains

-          Screen resolutions

-          Connection speeds

-          Distinction between internal and external users, classifying reading room users as external

 

Visits:

-          Visits

-          Average number of visits per visitor

-          Average number of visits per day

-          Average length of time per visit

-          Top referring sites

-          Visits by time of day

-          Visits by day

-          Paths through site (including ability to monitor variety of starting, destination points)

-          Top content groups

-          First-time visitors

o         Paths through site

o         Average length of visit

o         Pages visited

o         Entry page

o         Exit page

 

Technical performance/Hits:

-          Successful hits

-          Failed hits

-          Cached hits

-          Total items served

-          Average time to serve items

-          Kilobytes served

-          Traffic trends including hits by hour, day of week, weekend

-          Top spiders

 

Pages/Files:

-          Average number of page views in a day, week, month, year

-          Average number of page views per visit

-          Top pages visited, including length of time viewed

-          Top directories visited

-          Top entry pages

-          Top exit pages

-          Single access pages

-          Pages not visited in X number of months/years

-          Page download time

-          Top downloaded files

-          Top accessed file types

 

Commercial search engines:

-          Referring search engines

-          Referring search terms

-          Monitoring of search engine placement

 

LC internal search engines: These requirements will be amended to include search engine configuration changes (e.g. thesaurus implementation).

-          Search terms

-          Number of searches

-          Average number of searches per day

-          Zero hit searches

-          Pages searched

-          Collections searched

-          Sub-sites/content groups searched

-          Fields searched

-          Refined searches

o         Number of refined searches

o         Search terms used to refine

 

Commerce:Currently only the Sales Shop handles e-commerce.There are many opportunities to develop in this area:photoduplication, print-on-demand, CD/DVD generation, Today in History prints, etc.These requirements will be amended when more e-commerce features are implemented.

-          Sales by product category

-          Visits by product category

-          Sales by product

-          Sales by visitor type

-          Top paths to sale

-          Top points of abandonment

-          Customer satisfaction with transaction

 


Site Inventory, Mapping, and Maintenance Capabilities

Site inventory, mapping, and maintenance capabilities are required to assess site performance and manage site production.We should have the following data and capabilities:

 

-          Site map generation (including ability to generate maps of a variety of content groups)

-          Site inventory generation

-          Automated scheduling and scanning of sites

-          Snapshot of site at a given time

-          Metadata reporting (e.g. Page owner, Date last modified)

-          Link checking (including facilitation of link correction)

-          Number of Web pages

-          Number of files by format

-          Links per page

o        Average number of links per page

o        Pages with most links

o        Pages with no links

o        Number of external sites referenced

o        Internal and external duplicate links

-          Images

o        Average number of images per page

o        Pages with most images

o        Number of images per directory