Site overlay: clicks on external links not counted

Follow-up to Keyword phrases from WRAP repository blog

Some more trawling through the Google Analytics Help section today has turned up some discussion on their forum, which suggests that GA doesn't count clicks on links to external web pages, only clicks on links to elsewhere within the site.

This is something of a relief: I am not surprised that people are not clicking to read the pdf files of articles in WRAP, because I expected them to be interested in reading the "version of record", which is the one on the publisher's website which we always link to. I was very surprised that GA's site overlay reported no clicks from our records to publishers' web pages. Why would so many people be looking at the record in WRAP, while none were looking at the article itself? The only answer I could think of was that they must have gone back to their Google results that brought them to WRAP in the first place, or that they were satisfied by reading the article record in WRAP. Yet some must surely have wanted to read more, especially given that so many visitors seem to have come from academic networks... and now it all makes sense that people could indeed be clicking on our links to publishers' pages, but we simply can't measure those clicks.

So I can reassure authors that no-one will be reading the pdf versions we hold in WRAP(!) unless they have no other option because either they don't have a subscription to the published version or the published version is no longer available. Which is kind of what they want: many authors don't really feel comfortable with making their own early versions available. Now all I need to do is to convince authors of why we want the full text in WRAP at all, given that I know no-one is looking at it! My usual list of reasons is:

1) Google indexes the full text file, bringing visitors to your work in WRAP.
2) There will be those without subscription access who will be glad to read the earlier version. (This will include those in the commercial world but also those in academia in less wealthy countries).
3) This will be a back-up version of the work, for times when the publisher might be unable to make the work available - either temporarily, due to a technical hitch, or for the long term.
4) It is the long term nature of a repository that makes it different to putting your article on your own web page. Putting your article into an institutional repository is like libraries of old having copies of books and journals on shelves for future generations to consult.

As a librarian, my concern is to collect scholarly works and to make them available when they are needed. WRAP may be an electronic collection, but what we (the library) are trying to achieve with WRAP is very much our traditional role: we're just finding different ways to do that, as technology changes the possibilities for us.

Jenny Delasalle : 27 Apr 2009 12:02 |  Tags: Advocacy Google Analytics Statistics |  Comments (0) |  Report a problem