NOF-digitise Technical Advisory Service <<Information Papers index page

Introduction

NOF requires a means to measure and compare website usage data in a cohesive manner across all projects. This information is necessary to help assess the impact that the programme is creating and to produce comparable programme-wide performance statistics.

The basis for generating the performance indicators will be the webserver (HTTP) log. All projects are required to have the ability either to create reports directly from their webserver logs or to have them generated for them by competent webhosting companies. NOF will ask projects to extract and forward a reduced set of data as part of the ongoing monitoring process.

Proposed Performance Indicators

The four measurements that NOF requires all projects to supply are as follows:

• User Sessions
• Average duration of user session
• Page impressions
• Average page impressions per user session

Explanation of these measurements are provided below:

Table of common log analysis packages

User Sessions

The number of distinct user sessions chalked up over the reporting period.

User sessions are determined by grouping together all requests that come from the same IP address within a time interval of no less than 30 minutes between each request. The figure of 30 minutes is widely used and is the default in many web analysis packages.

Note: This is NOT the "unique users" value. User sessions include repeat visitors to your pages.

Note: Due to issues with NAT (Network Address Translation, used when several machines are connected from a local network through one Internet connection), proxy servers, etc there may be times when many users are simultaneously using the site all through the same IP address. In this situation, the user session becomes invalid - all these user sessions will be counted as one huge user session. This is a limitation of the way the Web works, and all services which collect statistics are subject to the same distortion of their figures.

Average duration of user session

By examining the time of the first and the last request made during a user session, a figure for the length of the user session can be obtained. The average duration of a user session is the average length of all user sessions found.

Note: some good packages (notably analog amongst others) are not able to calculate the user session length, so cannot provide this information. Where this is the case, projects should answer with "n/a : " followed by details of the log analysis package in use.

Page impressions

Total number of requests for files that are defined as pages.

Generally files that have extensions .htm, .html, .shtml, .php, .asp, .pl, .cgi and so forth. The exact set may differ amongst projects, projects will be expected to set up their analysis packages so that all page-type files are measured.

Note: Do not include images, graphics, stylesheets, external script files or other "component" files that together comprise one page.

Note: Requests that can be positively identifed as emanating from non-human sources should as a matter of standard practice be excluded from the analysis. You must ensure that your reports do not include data coming from search engine spiders, network monitors, benchmark tests and other generally invalid sources.

Note: Some projects may be generating dynamic urls where the base url remains the same, and the page delivered is determined by the contents of the query string: ie http://www.domain.com?page=search&type=quick.
In this case, special steps may have to be taken to convert log files to sensible page impressions values.

Average page impressions per user session

The average is obtained by dividing total page impressions by the total number of user sessions recorded.

Some references...

Web Site Performance Monitoring

http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/nof/support/help/papers/performance/

Compliance Corner: Server Logs:

http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/nof/support/help/faqs/compliance_serverlogs.htm

Measuring Web Site Usage: Log File Analysis:

http://www.nlc-bnc.ca/9/1/p1-256-e.html