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An Analysis of Web Site Usage

Rod Ward 

Rod.Ward@Sheffield.ac.uk

Introduction.

The Internet in general, and the World Wide Web in particular, is becoming an increasingly important source of information related to health for professionals and students reflecting wider use amongst all sections of society.

“By 1998 some 6 million people had used the Internet from home, a 76% increase on the previous year, and access and use continues to rise.”

DofH 1999 section 2.6

Nursing & Health Care Resources on the Net is a web site, which attempts to provide an index of over 1500 websites, mailing lists and newsgroups relevant to nurses and other health professionals. It has been running since 1993. At that time, an extensive search of the Internet found only 4 nursing related sites, and a couple of mailing lists with no central index. During 1994 my own students and close colleagues used the site, with each providing about 10 visits per week. As people started to find out about it, they suggested further sites (and mailing lists and newsgroups) to be included, and the site grew.

The site now lists over 1500 net resources for nurses and other health professionals and took over 100,000  hits in 1998. The site has recently been upgraded using Java Script to remove the frames based design and hopefully improve the ease of navigation and improve download times. It has a high graphical content with links to web sites being marked with their logo, as well as a short description. The site is unashamedly an eclectic collection of resources, intended to help novice net users from the healthcare community to begin to explore some of the resources available.  

Research questions

The purpose of this analysis was to identify who (part of world etc.) was accessing the site, when they accessed, what features they used, and trends in use over the last 5 years. 

Noonan (1997) identified several questions for trying to find out about the people who use a web site;

·     Where do people go online?

·     How long do they stay on a particular site or page?

·     What software are they using? 

·     Where do they get Internet access?

 and highlighted the importance of users behaviour patterns for web site designers;

“If you know what people like to see online, you can tailor your service to meet their needs. If the logs reveal that visitors keep looking for a certain type of material, maybe it should be provided. If the logs reveal that folks spend a minute and are off to something more interesting, maybe it's time to think about adding something like a searchable database or quiz to keep them a while longer. Folks "surf" the net for the same reason they switch channels, they are looking for a reason to stop.” 

She summarised the reasons for using some sort of log file as being:

“You want to know what's popular on your pages (and what isn't), who uses your system  and how they use it, and how you can improve the service.” 

Once one accepts that it is necessary to track the users of a web site, there are a variety of different tools that can be used, all of which have advantages and disadvantages. None of them are very accurate. Linder (1998) summarised this;

“It's been said, rightly, that trying to draw conclusions from web server statistics is like trying to nail Jell-o to the wall.  As you look at the statistics, I cannot stress strongly enough that they should only be used as very general trends and not as gospel truth. These numbers could easily be off (on the low side) by significant percentages. They are not, by any means, "hard numbers." 

Is that a fault with the software? The hardware? The operation of the system? No. The inaccuracy of the numbers is simply a by-product of the way the Web functions. Even the most technically advanced sites have only a general idea of the amount and nature of the traffic on their servers.” 

Linder (1998) goes further;

“Most large commercial sites such as America Online, Prodigy, and CompuServe, use large "caches" on the machines they use to service web requests. That means that once a user looks up one of our pages, it hangs around in memory at that site in case someone else wants to look at it. That way, things run faster - if person "A" looks at our genealogy page, and two minutes later, person "B" wants to look at it, person "B" gets it right away because it is still in memory from person "A", and the machine doesn't have to get it from us again. What effect does this have? 

It has the effect of reducing the number of reported "hits" we receive from those sites. It's entirely possible that we  only register one "hit" for every ten times someone at, for example, CompuServe, looks at the genealogy page. No,  there is no way whatsoever to determine exactly what effect this has on our numbers - it could be a factor of two, it could be orders of magnitude. Probably somewhere in the middle."

Methods 

Several different counters, trackers, and log files have been used to measure the page accesses or hits and collect a variety of data about the user. These work in different ways, log files are created by the server, which counts how many requests are received for a file. Counters and trackers require some html code to be placed on a page. When a request for this page is received from any machine connected to the Internet, an additional message is sent if the machine is the server. Counters will then increment by one. Trackers, in addition will record some details about the machine requesting the page e.g.: IP address (the identification of the machine requesting the page, which identifies the country or network being used), how the request was generated (e.g. a link from another page or search engine) and the set-up of the user (e.g. browser being used,  screen resolution etc). 

 Each method of measuring accesses and user/machine details has advantages and disadvantages, and their accuracy is influenced by the state of the Internet connection, their placement on a web page and the configuration of the user's system. 

The terms hit, visit or access in this context are used interchangeably, to indicate one request being received for that particular page. Alternative data about page impressions or volume of data transferred can provide additional information but were not used in this study. 

The primary sources of this data have been the Nedstat ( http://www.nedstat.net ) and Extreme (http://www.extreme-dm.com) counters which are both available free, but require the owner of the web site to insert some html code into the site to make them work. 

If users are accessing the site from a network that uses a cache (e.g. a university or commercial Internet Service Provider) their page views will not be recorded because the page is downloaded onto the local network for use. It is therefore likely, in those cases, that the number of hits in total considerably exceeds the numbers recorded by the trackers.  

Results 

The site itself, was one of the first for nursing on the World Wide Web. It was started in 1994 and received about 10,000 hits in the first 2 years (1994-1996). It was apparent from the exposure of the site, that we should explore the nature of its usage. In 1998, a counter and tracker were implemented to glean statistical data to analyze this web site's usage. The counter and tracker were placed into use when they became available to the site. The Nedstat counter was added to the site on July 2, 1998 and by the December 31, 1998 had recorded 51,591 hits. The Extreme tracker was added on May 13, 1998 and by December 31, 1998 recorded 39,091 unique visitors and a total of 118,512 page impressions (this includes where the same user has visited more than once and reloaded the page). Both counter and tracking methods are being used presently.

The site took over 100,000 hits during 1998. Access statistics were examined to see where these were coming from, times of day and days of the week, what browsers and operating systems were being used to build up a user profile.  

Hits per day 

The number of hits on the site varies with the days of the week, showing a visible drop in hits at weekends as can be seen by the example on Table 1.

Table 1

Table 2 shows the hits coming to the site by hour of the day in Greenwich Mean Time (GMT) between February 1998 and July 1999. The peak level of hits occurred during 15.00-15.59 and the lowest level during  07.00-07.59 .

Table 2

The hits for different pages show variations e.g. in times of the day e.g. nursing-UK (Table 3) & nursing - North-America  (Table 4). Table 3 shows the hits coming to the site by hour of the day in Greenwich Mean Time (GMT) from the UK between January 1998 and July 1999. The peak level of hits occurred during 14.00-14.59 and the lowest level during  04.00-04.59 .

Table 3

Table 4 shows the hits coming to the site by hour of the day in Greenwich Mean Time (GMT) from North America between January 1998 and July 1999. The peak level of hits occurred during 20.00-20.59 and the lowest level during  10.00-10.59.  

Table 4

The hits per Month from May 1998 to July 1999 are shown in Table 5. This revealed a gradual rise during 1998 with a fall around the Christmas period then a large rise in January 1999.

Table 5

The visitors  to the site are coming from all over the world as shown in Table 6. The largest number was from UK (.uk) domains followed by Network (.net), Commercial (.com) and unknown, which it is impossible to classify. The next largest section was from the USA, primarily educational institutions, (.edu) and then Australia (.au) and Canada (.ca). These are divided by continent in Table 7.

Table 6   Domains/Countries from which hits are coming - 13 May 98-16 July 99 (Source Extreme)

 + over 80 other countries/domains with less than 100 (0.1%) hits.

Table 7  Continents from which hits are coming - 13 may 98-16 July 99 (Source Extreme)

The way in which users arrive at the site showed that most are clicking on a link on another website, rather than using a search engine, as shown in Table  8. Very few of the users recorded were arriving via email or usenet newsgroup messages.  The most popular search engines that were used are shown in Table 9 and  1457 different keywords were used, the most popular are shown in Table 10.

Over 2500 other web sites have links to this one. The sites that are providing the most referrals in the form of hyperlinks which point to this site are shown in Table 11.

Table 8 Referral Sources 13 May 98-16 July 99 (Source Extreme)

Table 9  Most popular search engines 13 may98-16 July 99 (Source Extreme)

+    12   others with less than 1.00%

Table 10  Keywords used in search engines 13 May 98-16 July 99 (Source Extreme)

Table 11  Top referring pages 13 may 98-16 July 99 (Source Extreme)