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

Information professionals have featured strongly in the evaluation of the u se 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 websit es, to determine the most appropriate methods for evaluating use and to est ablish what forms of analysis could best be derived. A database of one mill ion subscribers and three months' worth of logs, constituting 65 million li nes of data, were obtained and the data were analysed using parsing techniq ues and the Statistical Package for the Social Sciences. There were problem s associated with the analysis, largely because of the difficulties in esta blishing the identity of Web users, determining what actually constitutes u se 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 varie d 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 con ducted 2.35 sessions over the survey period, spent 15 minutes on a search s ession 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 popu lar.