March 2020 DSpace repository statistics census

Each month, both Google Analytics and Google Search Console send out automated emails with a few key statistics figures. We are actively collecting these numbers for March, and are interested to compare these to the size of your repository (items). Read on to learn how you can receive these email reports if you have not yet received them for February, and how to contribute your numbers.

Monthly Google Analytics Snapshot

To check if you are already receiving the monthly email report from Google analytics, look for an email around March 3rd, titled:

"In February, you had ..K users visit your website (Google Analytics)"

If you have not yet received such emails, you can head over to the email subscription settings in https://www.google.com/analytics/settings/my_account to subscribe. You find these settings at the bottom of the page under a heading "Emailed Analytics".

The numbers that we are interested in collecting are your number of users and number of sessions, as indicated on this screenshot from the February email below

Monthly Search performance

Similar to the previous report, to check if you are already receiving the monthly email report from Google Search console, look for an email around March 4th, titled:

"Your February Search performance for https://...."

To activate a free subscription to this email report from Google Search console, visit https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/preferences

From this report, we are interested in recording the counts for "Clicks (web)" and "Impressions (web)".

How to contribute your data?

Anyone is invited to enter data for his or her repository in the publicly shared spreadsheet https://bit.ly/march-stats-census

What do you aim to learn from this data?

We are specifically interested in the correlation between size of the repository (item count) and the reported numbers. Are "bigger" repositories automatically attracting more traffic or is this not always the case?

On a more qualitative level, we hope to identify a few examples of repositories with relatively high numbers compared to others, to see if we can learn from these repositories and bring more exposure and traffic to others.

Need help?

This article assumes that you already have Google Analytics and Google Search console up and running for your repository. If this is not yet the case and would like assistance from the Atmire team, do not hesitate to contact us.

If you are interested in Google Analytics for DSpace, you may also like the recently recorded webinar on Repository Usage Statistics.