SAGA Progress Report - Web Statistics

SAGA
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SAGA Progress Report
April, 2004

V. WEB STATISTICS

The SAGA website provides a means to communicate globally about the program and disseminate the results of our research as working papers downloadable from the website.

The website has several main pages subordinate to the home page which describe the research themes and the goals of technical assistance, provide contact information for the project personnel and links to project partners, and offer downloads for the proposal, progress reports, and working papers. Most recently, a conference page has been added to the website to announce upcoming workshops and conferences, and to share information presented at recent events.

Collection of data to quantify the website usage was begun May 28, 2003. Attachments 3 (2003) and 4 (2004) are tables with detailed information on numbers of visits and downloads for individual pages within the website. The number of "hits" measured in 2003 totaled 31,159, with a "hit" defined as a single action on the web server, that is, a visitor downloading a single file or requesting a single file. The average number of hits per month for the period June-December, 2003, was 4,403. In the first three months of 2004, there have been 18,070 hits logged, or an average of 6,023 per month.

Because a single page may have more than one file—and thus contain more than one hit per page—the measurement of hits, although commonly reported by many website counters as indicator of website traffic, does not accurately reflect how often web pages are being viewed. When measurements are made for unique pages, without counting supporting graphics, we find that there were 11,018 pages viewed in 2003, or an average of 1,558 pages per month from June through December, 2003. For the first quarter of 2004, the total pages viewed were 5,983, averaging 1,994 pages per month.

Some of the files are available for download as PDF documents. These include the proposal, progress reports, and working papers. For May 28-December 31, 2003, there were a total of 5,661 files downloaded, of which 3,315 represented downloads of working papers. From June through December, the average monthly overall rate for downloads was 806 files, with 473 of these being working papers. An examination of Attachment 3 shows a progressive increase in the number of downloads per month throughout the year. In the first quarter 2004, the total number of downloads were 3,463 files (1154 per month average), of which 1,854 files are working papers (618 per month average).

While these measurements provide an idea of the website usage, these statistics do not tell us how many people are actually using the site, since one visitor may view several pages in a visit. Thus, the number of visitors to the site has also been collected for each month, as well as the amount of this number which represent unique visitors who are only counted during their first visit in the reporting period. For May 28-December 31, 2003, there were 9,329 visitors to the SAGA site, with 4,162 identified as unique. The monthly average of unique visitors to the site for the period June through December 2003 was 586. In the first three months of 2004, there have already been 5,033 visits to the website, with 2,348 of these unique. The average of unique visitors to the SAGA website has increased to 783 per month on average, nearly 34% more than in 2003.

With the addition of the conference pages, we will be posting conference papers and powerpoint presentations as web pages to extend the reaches of the information shared at the conferences far beyond the actual attendees.

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