Web site Usage
Over the past few weeks, we've been looking at Web site usage for the main NCSU Libraries web site. We're currently using Urchin software to access usage data and ClickHeat heatmapping software to visualize the number of visits we're receiving on our site.
Urchin software provides us with information about the number of visitors to the site, top paths that visitors take to get to information, what parts of the site have the heaviest use, how long visitors stay on the site and which browsers and platforms are most popular with our users.
Using data from Urchin for the time period of January 2009 to December 2009, we discovered that an average of 386K users visit our site per month. Over 50% of our users spend less than 10 seconds on the main Web site before jumping off into the Libraries' catalog, subscription databases, journals or article search; approximately 10% of our users spend between 10-30 minutes on the site. More than 50% of users reach the site directly through their browser by typing in the URL; more than 15% use Google to find us. Almost 73% of our end users are using either the Internet Explorer or Firefox browser, with usage spreading out almost evenly between the 2 browsers (38% and 36% respectively).
Some of the ways in which people are finding information from the homepage is through the links under 'Search the Collection.' The 'Catalog', Find Articles,' 'Databases,' and 'Journals' links make up 45% of the traffic on the homepage. Our heatmaps confirm the high usage of this section of the page (see the heatmap image in this post). Other popular sections of the site include the search box on the homepage, 'Citation Builder,' 'Course Reserves,' 'My Library,' 'Browse Subjects,' 'Learning Commons,' 'GIS' and the 'Scholarly Publications Repository.'