%0 Journal Article %1 huntington2008website %A Huntington, Paul %A Nicholas, David %A Jamali, Hamid R. %D 2008 %J Information Processing & Management %K %N 1 %P 358 - 372 %R 10.1016/j.ipm.2007.03.003 %T Website usage metrics: A re-assessment of session data %U http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0306457307000817 %V 44 %X Metrics derived from user visits or sessions provide a means of evaluating Websites and an important insight into online information seeking behaviour, the most important of them being the duration of sessions and the number of pages viewed in a session, a possible busyness indicator. However, the identification of session (termed often ‘sessionization’) is fraught with difficulty in that there is no way of determining from a transactional log file that a user has ended their session. No one logs out. Instead a session delimiter has to be applied and this is typically done on the basis of a standard period of inactivity. To date researchers have discussed the issue of a time out delimiter in terms of a single value and if a page view time exceeds the cut-off value the session is deemed to have ended. This approach assumes that page view time is a single distribution and that the cut-off value is one point on that distribution. The authors however argue that page time distribution is composed of a number of quite separate view time distributions because of the marked differences in view times between pages (abstract, contents page, full text). This implies that a number of timeout delimiters should be applied. Employing data from a study of the OhioLINK digital journal library, the authors demonstrate how the setting of a time out delimiter impacts on the estimate of page view time and the number of estimated session. Furthermore, they also show how a number of timeout delimiters might apply and they argue that this gives a better and more robust estimate of the number of sessions, session time and page view time compared to an application of a single timeout delimiter.

@article{huntington2008website, abstract = {Metrics derived from user visits or sessions provide a means of evaluating Websites and an important insight into online information seeking behaviour, the most important of them being the duration of sessions and the number of pages viewed in a session, a possible busyness indicator. However, the identification of session (termed often ‘sessionization’) is fraught with difficulty in that there is no way of determining from a transactional log file that a user has ended their session. No one logs out. Instead a session delimiter has to be applied and this is typically done on the basis of a standard period of inactivity. To date researchers have discussed the issue of a time out delimiter in terms of a single value and if a page view time exceeds the cut-off value the session is deemed to have ended. This approach assumes that page view time is a single distribution and that the cut-off value is one point on that distribution. The authors however argue that page time distribution is composed of a number of quite separate view time distributions because of the marked differences in view times between pages (abstract, contents page, full text). This implies that a number of timeout delimiters should be applied. Employing data from a study of the OhioLINK digital journal library, the authors demonstrate how the setting of a time out delimiter impacts on the estimate of page view time and the number of estimated session. Furthermore, they also show how a number of timeout delimiters might apply and they argue that this gives a better and more robust estimate of the number of sessions, session time and page view time compared to an application of a single timeout delimiter.}, added-at = {2013-03-31T14:49:04.000+0200}, author = {Huntington, Paul and Nicholas, David and Jamali, Hamid R.}, biburl = {https://www.bibsonomy.org/bibtex/2565f363f36a9a0a14c7ac44824ec91ad/sdo}, doi = {10.1016/j.ipm.2007.03.003}, interhash = {ba30ef785efd6a424b6e05b94cadb536}, intrahash = {565f363f36a9a0a14c7ac44824ec91ad}, issn = {0306-4573}, journal = {Information Processing & Management}, keywords = {}, note = {Evaluation of Interactive Information Retrieval Systems}, number = 1, pages = {358 - 372}, timestamp = {2013-03-31T14:49:04.000+0200}, title = {Website usage metrics: A re-assessment of session data}, url = {http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0306457307000817}, volume = 44, year = 2008 }