Measuring Audience Attention Across Multiple Channels for a New Web Site

This paper presents analysis done on traffic data for a new Web site section offered by the Library of Congress. The period analyzed covers the first two weeks of the site being publicly available. Large cultural Web sites, by virtue of their mission, often serve diverse groups of users and continually add to their Web site content. The additions go beyond routine maintenance and updating of pages and include the introduction of entirely new products that complement existing offerings. New site sections may have new features targeted to new audiences. While it may be easy to simply roll a new site into existing metrics reports, and only summarize the increased traffic to the “whole” site, valuable information can gained by developing customized analysis for new sites, taking into consideration the unique features of the site and its intended audience focus. This paper describes a customized analysis done for one particular site, the Chronicling America site, introduced in March 2007. The analysis reviews the Web activities, most employed by users, to drive user attention to the new Web site.