Common Web Metrics

Public Legal Education and Information (PLEI) Web Metrics

April 25, 2013, The Public Legal Education and Information Working Group adopted the following definitions of terms used to measure and analyze web usage. These were adapted from Avinash Kaushik's Web Analytics: An hour a Day, and Wikipedia's definitions for web analytics.

The PLEI Working Group is made up of representatives from the BC Ministry of Justice, Courthouse Libraries BC, Justice Education Society, Law Foundation of BC, Legal Services Society, People’s Law School, and PovNet.

Common Web Metrics

Term	Definition	Why you'd measure it	Notes
Visit	When a uniquely identified visitor views pages on a website. A visit ends when no new pages have been viewed in a defined time period – typically 30 minutes.	Visits and unique visitors “form the bedrock of all your computations, every single one of them. It is really important that you get them right.”	Visits are the single most important measure to track.
Unique visitor	A uniquely identified visitor that is generating page views within a defined time period (for example, a day, week or month).	It is an attempt to understand (1) how many “people” are coming to the website, and (2) visits from repeat visitors as compared to new visitors.	A uniquely identified visitor is usually a combination of a machine (for example, one's desktop computer at work) and a browser (Firefox on that machine). The identification is usually via a persistent cookie that has been placed on the computer by the site page code.
Page views	The number of pages viewed or requested during a visit.	It is an attempt to understand the engagement of visitors with the site – more page views per visit would suggest more engagement.	The concept of the page is fading. All pages are not created equal (for example, a blog might list 10 articles on one page or 1 article on one page), and a page view doesn’t fully measure rich media experiences.
Time on site	The average amount of time that visitors spend on the site during a visit. Also called length of visit or visit duration.	It is an attempt to understand the engagement of visitors with the site – longer time on site would suggest more engagement.	This metric can be complicated by the fact that analytics programs can not measure the length of the final page view. This drawback is particularly problematic for sites that have the information the visitor is seeking on the page where the visitor lands (in other words, the visit consists of viewing one page): there is no way to know whether the visitor spent 30 seconds or 30 minutes on that page.
Bounce rate	The percentage of visits that are single page visits.	For a content site, a low bounce rate (e.g., below 35%) can be an indicator that visitors are highly engaged with the site, as it suggests that most visitors are accessing multiple pages.	Bounce rate is of questionable value for sites where visitors are likely to find what they are looking for on the entry page. For a portal site, which aims to drive traffic to other sites, a high bounce rate can actually be an indicator that the site is effectively linking visitors from their entry page on the portal site to an external site.
Conversion rate	A conversion is where a visitor successfully completes a goal defined in a web analytics program such as Google Analytics.	A conversion rate can be a good way to measure whether visitors are achieving the purpose the site is designed to support.	An example of a conversion on Clicklaw is when a visitor clicks through to an external resource from a contributor organization. Each site will have its own – and varying – goals and conversion rates.
Hits	A request for a file from the web server.	You should not be measuring hits. The number of hits is very misleading and dramatically overestimates popularity. A single web page typically consists of multiple (often dozens) of discrete files, each of which is counted as a hit as the page is downloaded, so the number of hits is really an arbitrary number more reflective of the complexity of individual pages on the website than the site's actual popularity.	The total number of visits or page views provides a more realistic and accurate assessment of site popularity.

Further definitions

Portal website: A website whose primary purpose is to bring information together from diverse sources in a uniform way. A website that links to content hosted on other sites. Also known as a directory site.

Content website: A website whose primary purpose is to produce, maintain and host content – for example, substantive legal information about a topic, a series of videos on a topic, or a series of self-help guides.

You probably seeing this word used in terms like substantive law, substantive issues, or substantive orders, and it is used to identify aspects of these things (be they laws, legal issues, or court orders) that deal with the legal rights and duties of the parties involved in a case. Substantive law defines and regulates the rights and obligations of individuals, as opposed to procedural law, which outlines the methods and means by which substantive law is made and administered. In family law, substantive issues often involve matters such as guardianship and parenting arrangements relating to children, support, and the division of property. A substantive order from a judge will be a decision about a substantive issue, versus a procedural order which will be about how steps in the litigation should.