KLG: Evaluating Your Digital Core

Thursday February 3, 10:40 am

Heather Cunningham, Librarian, University of Toronto;

Peter Atkinson, E-Services Specialist, St Thomas PL;

Marian Doucette, Web Architect, Huron County PL

Heather:

CrazyEgg.com is a commercial service which tracks where people click in your site -- generates a heat map for your site. Rates vary from $9 to $99 a month, depending on # visitors, # pages you can track at once.
Used other measurement tools too, e.g. web analytics, in person Qs, stats from web guides.

Marian:

go where your users are
Pick social media which matches demographic of your users.
Only 3% of social media users are 65+
Average age of all social media = 37; of Twitter users = 39, Facebook = 38, LinkedIn = 44
Be clear on your goal: e.g. is it
to drive traffic to a database
to bring in foot traffic
to get feedback on a program or proposal

Basic Metrics…

Unique users = # distinct people who visit site on given day = Awareness of your site
Page views = # distinct pages viewed on given day = Stickiness of site / value of site’s content
Bounce rate = % people who view 1 page & leave = Interest in site/content
Time spent = Amount of time average user spends on site = Is site destination or pass-through

www.pingdom.com - tool for measuring website performance (down time, response time, get email and twitter alerts $9.95 per month for five sites & 20 SMS alerts)
Facebook has Insights: install piece of code on your website and then get metrics on who is using your site. Will shows number of impressions shown to users, # likes, etc.
Huron County is using facebook to search catalogue -- used fbml (sort of like html) to create tabs and embed catalogue search box in Huron County Library facebook page
Now using stat counter, Google analytics to see if social media is driving people to library catalogue website
TwitterAnalyzer
Tweet Effect
Facebook ads -- type in city name to see how many users there are (LOTS for Elmira, quite a few for New Hamburg, Baden, fewer for Ayr. Ab0ut 15 for New Dundee. None for St. Clements, Linwood, Bloomingdale.)

Other guides:

Pew Internet reports , e.g. Who's Online - demographics of Internet users; Generations and their Gadgets . You can also subscribe to get regular updates from Pew Institute.

1. Focus your objectives.

2. Pick 2-3 relevant measures.

3. Pull data regularly.

4. Look for unexplained trends.

5. Analyze, test & fix.

KLG