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How Idiots Track Success (HITS)

Martin White has written a blog entry discussing ways of measuring intranet success, such as usage stats or surveys. This is certainly a difficult area, one that I think we are all still struggling with. To quote Martin:

Web page stats for intranets can be very misleading. You can often get high page hits on pages that people have found in error as a result of poor information architecture. The hits need to be analysed in context, taking account of the paths through the site (i.e. was the page found by a search, hyperlink, or another navigation option). Often a page might be used very infrequently, but the low hit rate is not a measure of the value of that page, which might be an important policy document, for example.

What is missing from this weblog entry is reference to search engine statistics. Unlike hits, this tracks what users were looking for, not merely what they found...

Posted by jamesr on November 12, 2002 08:38 AM
Categories: Intranets, Metrics & ROI