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IT&T - 46: Website Measurement Policy

Policy

Departments and agencies must implement a website measurement facility on their Internet websites.

Background

Website statistics are an important part of any web site. They can show if your website is providing a return on investment.

Gathering information on website traffic helps you plan and develop your website to more effectively meet your users and potential users needs. You need to be able to judge the effectiveness of your website’s content, design, navigation and technology. The information gathered can assist in:

  • identifying the most popular content, ie., information and services offered.
  • optimizing website navigation, by tracing the navigation paths through your website;
  • identifying search engines and keywords used to access your site;
  • assessing the effectiveness of marketing campaigns;
  • identifying browser types used to access your website; and
  • identifying the locality of your users.

Implementation Guidelines

The web measurement facility will minimally provide statistics on:

  • Unique visitors;
  • User sessions;
  • Page views/impressions;
  • Referring URLS
  • Search Engine Requests (External)
    • Top 50 keywords
    • Top 50 phrases
    • Top 10 search engines.

Web measurement facilities may be provided by either server log based measurement or browser based measurement systems. The measurement facilities should ensure that they can supply the information in accordance with the definitions used within this policy.

Web managers will be expected to provide this information on a six monthly basis as required.

Definitions

  • Unique Visitor – an individual visitor to your website who may visit on numerous occasions but is only counted the once.
  • User Sessions – Each separate time a visitor visits your web site it is counted as a User Session
  • Page Views/Impressions – A file or combination of files submitted to a visitor of a website as a result of that visitor’s request being received by the web server.
  • URL – Universal Resource Locator - includes the protocol (eg., HTTP, FTP), the domain name (or IP address), and additional path information (folder/file). On the Web, a URL may address a Web page file, image file, or any other file supported by the HTTP protocol.
  • Referring URLs – the universal resource locator of the page the user came from to get to your website
  • Search Engine Requests (External) – the external search engines which have referred traffic to your website.

Other Relevant Information

Australian Web Measurement Standards and Guidelines, endorsed by the Internet Industry Initiative – 8 July 2002 – Version 1.0

(Please note, there is currently work underway to build in additional qualitative measures alongside pure statistical information. This will further inform the Victorian Government about usage of websites.)

Note: This policy will be reviewed annually or earlier as required.

June 2003

Added: 5 December 2005 Page views: 5,728 Rating: 0.0 Votes: 0
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Last updated: 14 August 2009