Best Practices: When Library Visitors Come Calling Virtually
Sarah Houghton-Jan, in her “Effective ‘Virtual Visits’ Statistics” webinar for Infopeople last week, reviewed the good, the bad, and the ugly of how we track and document the use of library services and resources by our invisible customers—those who visit online rather than onsite.
The punch line: there currently is not a service or a solution which is going to meet the varied needs of all libraries in search of accurate virtual-visit statistics. Some of what is available requires quite a bit of staff effort to produce results; other options are easier and less time-intensive to manage.
An initial challenge, she said, involves trying to define what a virtual visit is: “a user’s request of the library website or catalog from outside the library building regardless of the number of pages or elements viewed.” Webinar attendees who were able to hear the entire presentation walked away understanding that defining and measuring visits in these terms provides a very different number than the one which we obtain when we measure each “hit”—access to an individual page or file—as a separate “visit” regardless of how many pages the same visitor viewed during one session. Most analytic software can differentiate between visits and hits, she noted.
Among the tips Sarah offered to those interested in counting visits: create a list of domain names you need to count; compile a list of internal IP addresses to screen out visits from those within the physical facilities since this group is primarily comprised of staff; check to see whether your existing software allows you to accurately track visits; and count as many pages and paths into and out of your sites as possible to gain a more accurate picture of how the invisible customers are using what you offer.
“There is no one answer. There is no one solution for people. Everybody’s situation is different. We are all starting at different points. We all have different networks. We all have different hosting set ups. We all have different web presences,” she emphasizes in a rerecorded podcast presentation prepared shortly after the webinar was over.
Those interested in more specific information about what currently is available, and how it works, will find the podcast, a list of additional resources, and a copy of the PowerPoint presentation from her original webinar on the Infopeople website. She has also provided her own summary of her presentation on her Librarian in Black blog.