Web metrics & the BMJ Group

Moving 35 products to a managed web metrics service

SSP 29th Annual Meeting

Dom Mitchell, Web Manager, BMJ Groupdmitchell@bmjgroup.com

June 2007

Background

• British Medical Journal, 1840• 24 specialist journals• 28 web sites with HighWire Press• 10 online products hosted by BMJ Group• Active acquisitions policy• Active ‘new product development’ department

Introduction

• Where we were• Who needs metrics

– Business– Customers

• Our experience with HitList• Moving to Coremetrics’ Publisher Stats• Implementation• The future

Where we were

• Metrics provided by:– WebTrends– Google Analytics– Editorial and institutional, and Analog reports– Synergy– ABCe audit (http://www.abce.org.uk)– Webalizer 2.01 (http://www.mrunix.net/webalizer/)– ISSEL (now MarketWave) Pilot HitList

• For products on various platforms

Who needs metrics? Business

• Advertising• Editorial• Co-owning societies/management & editorial

boards• Consortia sales• National Health Service

Who needs metrics? Advertising

• ABCe – an annual audit of bmj.com, StudentBMJ, and BMJ Careers, for:– Unique users - how many– Page impressions - how busy– Visits - how often– Ad impressions - what see– Ad clicks - what do

• Which group of doctors is looking at what content?

• Data from registration

Who needs metrics? Editorial

• Editorial usage reports from HighWire, denoting popular content eg who’s clicking on what (bmj.com’s Hit parade)

• The most cited and most read• Most popular URLs, search terms and referrals• Number of downloads (abstract, full text and PDF)• Usage of free content vs. content behind access controls• Click-through’s from alerts• Annual blocking questionnaire on bmj.com

Who needs metrics? Societies/boards

• Number of downloads (abstract, full text and PDF)

• Visits and visitors by country• Historic trend report of page impressions and

visits• Authors by country/specialty• Papers submitted by topic• Total logins by member

Who needs metrics? Consortia sales

• Customer profiling across products, regardless of platform – historic/present day

• Usage during free trials• A snap-shot of customer activity at any given time, on

any product• Ability for customers to access their own COUNTER stats• Ability to email stats to customers in a customised and

branded report• Usage via Eduserv Athens• Usage by non-subscribers

Who needs metrics? NHS

• One of our largest customers who can influence our success from one year to the next.

• Best Treatments and Clinical Evidence in the NHS Information Authority Clinical & Patient Topic Review

• Both had to be COUNTER compliant

Who needs metrics? Our customers

• COUNTER compliant usage stats:– Journal (JR 1-4) and database (DR 1-3) reports– Both at consortia level and individual institution level

• Most popular pages by institution• Number of downloads (abstract, full text and

PDF)

Our experience with HitList

• Labour intensive and not enough resource to correctly manage the SLA we had chosen

• Not enough knowledge around SQL and database management

• Dated hardware and little support from the IT department

• Log files are huge (>1GB for bmj.com)! We have 27 sites; storage is an issue

• HitList is highly configurable! Great…• So it’s easy to make mistakes at multiple levels.• Option to produce COUNTER reports would have been

costly in time and money

Moving to Coremetrics

• A managed service where all data handling is done remotely

• Data storage and IT problems cease to be an issue

• Ability to load all our products into one service to produce a Group report

• Familiarity with HighWire• Price advantages• Publishers Stats has already been

implemented successfully in the UK for other publishers

Implementation

• 18 product groups means 18 ‘Implementation Guides’– Each guide has 35 fields approx that need completed– More than 1 department/person needs to input

• The UK is perhaps a young market for Coremetrics?– ABCe auditing needs?– NHS/Athens requirements?

Implementation

• What you get out is as good as what you put in! Customer reports require clean customer data– We have multiple IDs per customer– Multiple databases– No naming conventions so multiple versions of institutions

over all databases– No de-duping so multiple subscriptions for one institution– Our fulfilment system (JFS) doesn’t store the data that

Coremetrics require: IP range, Athens ID and institutional name

– JFS does not store free trial data

Implementation

• Redevelopment work is needed on our sites to make them capture the correct information

• No ability to store consortia parent/child relationships– The most up-to-date source of institutional data is a

spreadsheet

• We allow customers to update their own IP ranges

• We do not hold current email addresses for all our subscribers

The future

• Consolidation of customer data had to be done anyway

• Project will have further reaching benefits as we move towards a more integrated customer view

• Hope to be able to integrate metrics with purchasing records, responses to marketing campaigns, author submissions, peer reviewing etc to build a more complete profile of who our customers are

bmjgroup.bmj.com