On comparing site to site, I believe you can do this, as long as your metric tool remains the same. We use the same stats package (AWStats) across all of our sites, with the same settings, which means they’re all treated the same. That means even if our stats were are all wrong from real world numbers, all of the sites would be equally wrong. This is why I focus on the trends, and the comparisons between sites don’t focus on the numbers themselves but the disparity between them. Obviously people spend a lot more time on the Channel than on our Tickets site. That’s mainly what I want to know, the actual amount of time is less important to me.

Now between the Walker and the Met, since we use different stats packages, yes, it becomes much harder. Even if we both used Analog or AWStats we may have them configured differently. This is why I’m a big fan of Google Analytics. Mainly because it’s more accurate as it does use cookies and Javascript to capture data log files can’t, but also because everyone that uses it has the same settings, which makes comparison between sites easier (and when Google updates, everyone gets the update at the same time). The downside is of course plopping JS on every page on a site. Even for us that’s just not feasible at this time.

Anyway, I’m always interested in how others interpret their stats. It can be a bit of a guessing game, but it’s nice to get new ideas from others. Thanks for sharing.

http://analog.cx/docs/webworks.html

in particular, the “What you can’t know” section? I’ve been using Analog forever and Stephen Turner may know more about web analysis than anyone. Basically, his point is that any measure of visits (user sessions) or visitors is a) inherently wrong, at least to a degree, and b) not comparable from site to site. So it makes sense to use page views as a point of comparison.

We tend to look at “page views by section,” eg to avoid the problem of comparing the Works of Art section (where people tend to click quickly through several pages) to the Visitor Info section (where we hope they find what they’re looking for without having to click very much at all). It’s like your tickets vs. blogs issue. And then we use “visits” internally, but mainly for two reasons:

1) as long as we don’t change our server-side caching, and there aren’t huge shifts in how users cache, we can track site growth over short (months to a year, say) periods of time.

2) The comparison to physical museum visits is too tempting to avoid making, even if I think it’s a little bogus. We try to back it up with surveys to figure out how often people come to website/museum (but that’s a lot of work).

“Page views” of course makes less sense with very dynamic pages, and I haven’t really figured out what to do about that. But it will mean that year-on-year comparisons are harder to make as we add more dynamic pages to the site.

Thanks,

Matt