June is the end of our fiscal year, a time when everyone responsible for compiling statistics completes those all-important spreadsheets demonstrating program success (or so it is hoped). The report card on the Walker websites was a good one. This graph reflects the combined user sessions of the three domains managed by new media: walkerart.org, mnartists.org, and artsconnected.org (a collaboration with The Minneapolis Institute of Arts). In FY05-06, we had 6.3 million visitors, and in the year ending last month 8.7 million, an almost 40% increase.

The four main metrics we report are page views, unique visitors, user sessions, and user hours. We emphasize users sessions, believing they are the best comparison to the Center’s attendance numbers, while recognizing that all web statistics are subject to inherent caveats. For more on importance of using multiple metrics, see Brent’s recent post.

Here’s the breakdown on the Walker numbers by domain:

On walkerart.org, we’re especially interested in where visitors are spending their time. Traditionally, the Walker calendar, Gallery 9, and the home page have been the most popular sections. Last year, Walker blogs entered the top tier and continue to rise, outpacing the calendar in September of 2006, the home page in January 2007, and Gallery 9 in February 2007. The Walker blogs have remained on top ever since and are without question, the most visited section of the Walker site.

I came across this story online about how Nielsen/NetRatings is going to drop its normal website rankings that use page views as a metric, and change to user session length instead. Much of this has to do with the advent of AJAX, with content loading on the same “page” and thus not being counted in the page views statistic Nielsen/NetRatings currently uses.

Forget how this impacts the current online leaders (the article says it will hurt Google, and in the same breath says it will help YouTube, go figure), I just found it interesting that they were still using page views as their main metric. While we certainly keep track of them here, we tend to put much more weight into user sessions. Take for example this comparison of page views vs. user sessions on our website, from Feb. ’07:

tickets.walkerart.org

Page Views: 347,258

User Sessions: 2,581

blogs.walkerart.org

Page Views: 305,609

User Sessions: 105,387

Notice the difference? Our tickets website had more page views than our blogs did, but only 2% of the user sessions. Why? Well, it’s mainly because there are many more pages in our ticketing system to go through to place an order, as well as a few iframes here and there that just inflates the page count. By itself, one would think looking at the page views that tickets was the more popular site, but in reality many more people visit our blogs.

Like any statistic it’s important to look at multiple sets of data to come to a conclusion. With these two metrics we can not only find the depth of our visitors but also the breadth. Blog users don’t seem to dig as much, perhaps because they don’t have to compared to what’s required in a ticketing system checkout process, or perhaps because they haven’t found anything interesting to read and leave!

This is where Nielsen has made their change. Instead of just looking at simple page numbers (which is important to advertisers to count “impressions” of ads), they’re now wanting to see how long someone has spent on a website. This means the trend has changed from the number of impressions, to the overall impression length.

We also keep track of user session length on our websites. And again when combined with the other metrics, it adds another layer of info we can use to determine the relative success and weakness of our sites. Here are the user session lengths of the above sites for the same time period, in seconds:

tickets.walkerart.org

Session Length (secs): 589

blogs.walkerart.org

Session Length (secs): 281

Probably what you would expect. It took a lot longer for those users on tickets to weed through all those pages to place their order. However if you look at the ratio of users to page views for each site, and then look at the session length, you’ll notice that blog readers spend more time on each page during their sessions.

tickets.walkerart.org

Ave. Secs./Page: 4.4

blogs.walkerart.org

Ave. Secs./Page: 96.9

Obviously the tickets time is a bit skewed, because of iframes, robots and the like, but this shows that people do spend much more time on average on each page on our blog website than on tickets, even though the overall session length on blogs is less. This is good, it means people are getting through the ticketing software quickly, even with all the pages to load, and it also means people are actually staying on our blogs and (hopefully) reading.

Session length can also show us popular sites we may have otherwise missed. Take our Walker Channel from the same period:

channel.walkerart.org

Page Views: 21,596

User Sessions: 6,732

Session Length (secs): 574

Ave Secs/Page: 179

The user sessions on our channel aren’t super high, at least not in comparison to some of our other sites, and neither are the page views. However, the session length, and more importantly, the number of secs users spent per page is very high. Those people who do visit the Walker Channel like to spend a lot of time there. Perhaps this is something we should put more time into, to drive more users to this content? In fact, that’s exactly what we are starting to work on.