The Value of Web Statistics

So you've built yourself an intranet, and stocked it with useful information. But is anyone actually reading it?

To successfully run and grow your intranet, you should be asking questions such as:

• How heavily used is the intranet?
• Is the usage growing or falling?
• What are the most popular pages?
• There is important information on the intranet. Is it being read?
• Can users make sense of the intranet?
• Is the intranet navigation working?
• Has recent training and marketing increased intranet usage?
• When during the day is the intranet used?
• How much load is the intranet placing on the network?
• What pages are generating the most network traffic?

The answers to these questions can be found using web statistics.

What are web statistics?

Intranets are usually run on a webserver. This webserver not only provides pages to users, but tracks exactly which pages are accessed and when.

This information can be analysed by a web statistics package (also known as a "log analyser") to provide considerable information about the usage of the intranet. While exactly what statistics can be gained will vary, depending on the package used, a good package will provide you with:

• daily and monthly summaries
• graphical charts of usage
• number of hits and pages
• most popular pages
• largest amount of downloads
• overall network traffic
• browsers used to access the intranet

It may be possible to gain considerably more information than this, so shop around, and see what web analyser software is available for your platform.

Who can make use of web stats?

Everyone.

All major webservers (such as Apache, IIS, iPlanet, Netscape) have either built-in web statistics packages, or are well- supported by a wide variety of both commercial and freeware packages.

If you are the administrator of your webserver, you can install software directly on the server. Alternatively, as long as your administrator can provide you with the server logs, you can run statistics software on any workstation.

An example: webalizer

The following examples were generated using Webalizer, a completely free web statistics program that works well on Apache and Linux. While there are many other packages on the market, they will give similar results to those shown here.

Beside each sample is the list of questions (see the beginning of the article) that can be answered using the provided information. Note that some questions are best answered by using a number of the provided statistics.

Graph of monthly usage

Shows at a glance the overall state of intranet usage, as well as the growth or decline in usage.

Questions answered:

• How heavily used is the intranet?

• Is the usage growing or falling?
  This graph will clearly show whether usage is increasing or falling. If usage is going down, or not growing at a reasonable rate, it's time to starting thinking about further marketing your intranet.

  If growth is poor, you might also want to check whether your users are struggling to understand the design of the intranet. This can be done using some simple usability testing.

Summary by Month
Month	Daily Avg				Monthly Totals
	Hits	Files	Pages	Visits	Sites	KBytes	Visits	Pages	Files	Hits
Nov 2000	891	404	95	10	7	34851	231	2207	9296	20501
Oct 2000	423	117	45	8	5	197033	246	1374	3511	12703
Sep 2000	382	111	39	5	9	37359	168	1156	3239	11098
Aug 2000	419	173	56	8	7	40494	266	1762	5373	12990
Jul 2000	487	183	85	9	12	130919	283	2564	5494	14625
Jun 2000	319	109	62	7	7	154907	217	1878	3289	9599
May 2000	164	62	33	5	2	63861	168	1042	1944	5113
Apr 2000	93	26	15	3	3	36097	116	451	807	2794
Mar 2000	242	102	75	5	1	63854	176	2325	3188	7532
Feb 2000	308	126	68	7	5	19501	99	954	1771	4321
totals						778876	1970	15713	37912	101276

Table of monthly usage

This shows the same information as the previous graph, but in a numerical format that lends itself well to in-depth analysis.

Questions answered:

• How much load is the intranet placing on the network?
  The total number of kilobytes downloaded will show the load on the network generated by your intranet. Most packages will also show a breakdown by hour, or even minute.

  This information may be of value to your network administrators: if nothing else, it may reassure them that the intranet is not adversely impacting the overall speed of the network.

• How heavily used is the intranet?

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Author
James Robertson is the managing director of Step Two Designs, an online development company based in Sydney, Australia. James specialises in XML development, information management and systems design.