We’ve been thinking a lot lately about ways to measure site usage. Last month we wrote an article about InsectaPod Cast for an entomology publication and found ourselves wanting to make very specific claims about who has been listening to the podcast. this same info will be valuable as we near the end of the fiscal year and argue for funds to continue the podcast, and good user stats play a role in accessibility and usability.

Thus far, we’ve been relying on the visitor statistics offered by our web host. For the most part, this has been acceptable. I’ve also read some posts that suggest using multiple trackers is valuable, and that page views, which I tend to focus on, are less valuable than user sessions, which my current host doesn’t give me much insight into. As we really dug into the process of using this metric to see if InsectaPod Cast was meeting its goals, though, I realized that the log provided by my web host just wasn’t cutting it.

I’d used statcounter in the past, which offers some tracking for free and then charges for data storage beyond the most recent 100 visitors. Anna suggested we use google analytics this time, though, after hearing it discussed in a presentation at National Extension Technology Conference. Google Analytics has also been used in some projects at the Writing in Digital Environments Center at MSU, where I am a researcher. So I activated that today, and we’ll see what happens.
Up to this point, we’ve seen visitors, unique visitors, and page views increase nearly every month since we posted episode one in July 2007 (the only month there was a decrease was December 2007, a month in which we didn’t post an update). Popular keywords include bedbugs, pinned insect collections, insect gentalia, and ludifisk. The most commonly viewed pages are the most recent episode, the rss feed, and this blog. It’ll be interesting to see what new information we can glean from google analytics, and compare it with what we’re getting from the web host.