Evaluating consumer website logs: a case study of The Times/The Sunday Times website

Abstract

Information professionals have featured strongly in the evaluation of the use of commercial online hosts and online public access catalogues, but not so strongly in the evaluation of the use of websites. This paper describes a piece of research that was conducted on The Times/The Sunday Times websites, to determine the most appropriate methods for evaluating use and to establish what forms of analysis could best be derived. A database of one million subscribers and three months’ worth of logs, constituting 65 million lines of data, were obtained and the data were analysed using parsing techniques and the Statistical Package for the Social Sciences. There were problems associated with the analysis, largely because of the difficulties in establishing the identity of Web users, determining what actually constitutes use and measuring the time spent online. Men in their 30s were the sites’ most numerous subscribers. The majority of subscribers were foreign and came from commercial organisations. Use varied considerably from hour to hour and day to day and from country to country: in the UK, midweek lunchtimes proved very popular. On average, a user conducted 2.35 sessions over the survey period, spent 15 minutes on a search session and 0.5-2.1 minutes on reading a page. Commercial organisations and Americans were the heaviest users and news pages proved to be the most popular.