Re: Browsing percentages / analytics

From: David Pattern <d.c.pattern_at_nyob>
Date: Thu, 7 Feb 2008 16:51:47 -0000
To: NGC4LIB_at_listserv.nd.edu
Hi Tim

This is using data from the last 12 month period:

2,055,707 - total keyword searches

The percentage figures in brackets are a % of that total keyword search
figure...

62,410 (3.0%) - clicks on "Did you mean?" spelling suggestions
33,709 (1.6%) - clicks on "People who borrowed this, also borrowed"
links
 4,131 (0.2%) - clicks on xISBN/ThingISBN other edition links*
 2,058 (0.1%) - clicks on keyword combination suggestions**
   381 (0.02%) - clicks on "We think you might be interested in"**

* We stopped using xISBN a few months ago and now only use the
downloadable ISBN list from ThingISBN (thanks Tim!)

** These last 2 are fairly new.  The 1st gives you a suggestion if you
enter just 1 or 2 keywords, and it suggests up to 4 other keywords that
you might want to combine with your search (the suggestions are based on
all previous keyword searches by our users, rather than some uber list
of "good" keywords chosen by staff).  The 2nd gives the user a single
personalised suggestion when they log into their library account.

The keyword searches used the following indexes...

1,347,864 (65.6%) - general keyword (default)
  252,494 (12.3%) - title keyword
  243,996 (11.9%) - author keyword
   68,022  (3.3%) - subject keyword
   42,040  (2.0%) - journal title keyword

In terms of the number of results found...

439,618 (21.4%) - searches that gave zero results
529,848 (25.8%) - searches that gave more than 100 results
 88,767  (4.3%) - searches that gave more than 1,000 results
  5,777  (0.3%) - searches that gave more than 10,000 results

Number of keywords used for the search...

716,539 (34.9%) - 1 keyword
741,439 (36.1%) - 2 keywords
319,356 (15.5%) - 3 keywords
141,490  (6.9%) - 4 keywords
 67,479  (3.3%) - 5 keywords
 30,418  (1.5%) - 6 keywords
 14,779  (0.7%) - 7 keywords


What I don't currently measure are:

1) searches on alphabetical indexes (i.e. "Starts with") -- partly
because I don't think I've ever seen a student use one of them, and
mostly because I wouldn't be able to do anything useful with the data
;-)

2) number of item pages viewed (i.e. you've run a search, how many of
those results do you actually click on to find out more details?)

3) how many people click on the links to LibraryThing in our OPAC ;-)

Having the number of item pages viewed would give a more accurate %
figure for the clicks on the borrowing suggestions.  So, not quite 3%,
but 1.6% is still good!

regards
Dave Pattern
University of Huddersfield






Dave Pattern
Library Systems Manager
University of Huddersfield

email: d.c.pattern_at_hud.ac.uk
phone: 01484 472043

-----Original Message-----
From: Next generation catalogs for libraries
[mailto:NGC4LIB_at_listserv.nd.edu] On Behalf Of Tim Spalding
Sent: 04 February 2008 19:59
To: NGC4LIB_at_listserv.nd.edu
Subject: [NGC4LIB] Browsing percentages / analytics

Has anyone done analytics on click-throughs for recommendations, tags
and etc. in the OPAC? I'm no.

Has anyone seen numbers for ecommerce sites? What percentage follow
the recommendation links on Amazon anyway?

LT is starting to collect some of this data for LTFL. So far-six hours
of data-it looks like, when book recommendations appear, they are
clicked on 3% of the time. That seems pretty good to me, considering
most OPAC use is for specific finding, not for generalized browsing.

Anyone have any info about comparative numbers? Anyone done Google
Analytics and gotten useful stats out of them?

T

--
Check out my library at http://www.librarything.com/profile/timspalding






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Received on Thu Feb 07 2008 - 11:53:41 EST