Two months ago the New Zealand cultural aggregator Digital NZ ingested metadata from roughly 250 NZ-related objects from the Powerhouse collection and started serving them through their network.
When our objects were ingested into Digital NZ they became accessible not just through the Digital NZ site but also through all manner of widgets, mashups and also institutional website that had integrated Digital NZ’s data feeds.
So, in order to strengthen the case for further content sharing in this way, we used Google Analytics’ campaign tracking functionality to quickly and easily see whether users of our content in Digital NZ actually came back to the Powerhouse Museum website for more information on the objects beyond their basic metadata.
Here’s the results for the last two months.
Total collection visits from Digital NZ – 98 (55 from New Zealand)
Total unique collection objects viewed – 66
Avg pages per visit – 2.87
True time on site per visit (excluding single page visits) – 11:57min
Repeat visits – 37%
From our perspective these 55 NZ visitors are entirely new visitors (well, except for the 8 visits we spotted from the National Library of NZ who run Digital NZ!) who probably would never have otherwise come across this content so that’s a good thing – and very much on keeping with our institutional goals of ‘findability’.
For the same period, here are the top 6 sources for NZ-only visitors to the museum’s collection (not the website as a whole) –
(click for larger)
Remember that the Digital NZ figure is for around only 250 discrete objects and so we are looking at just under 1 new NZ visitor a day to them via Digital NZ, whereas the other sources are for any of the ~80,000 collection objects.
However, I don’t have access to the overall usage data for Digital NZ so I can’t make a call on whether these figures are higher, lower, or average. But maybe one of the Digital NZ team can comment?
One reply on “Actual use data from integrating collection objects into Digital NZ”
This is really helpful to see Seb (!), thank you! We’re in the process of telling would-be commons participants that aggregating their content to a central site will result in a net gain of visitors back to the holding institution. It would be great to see what the use of your collections looks like from the DigitalNZ logs. (The hacienda will be built.)