This talk by Ranjit Sidhu from Nedstat (a company specialising in Web site stats).

He is going to look at:
Benchmarking the sector against the web
Benchmarking your institution
Future Trends

The First Sector Statistics Snapsho was done of 22 institutions in March 2006. The second snapshot is going to be for the month of May 2006, and intended to then repeat every 6 months.

So – what should be measured? This is tricky in education, because the client base is so varied – prospects, existing students, alumni, staff etc.

So – now some stats – these are going to be posted on the web at some point – so I’ll just pick out some of these here:
Visitors accepting Cookies
Sector: Accept 95.93% (slight decline) – acceptance from internal IPs is slightly higher than overall, but external slighly lower.
Overall: 96.8%

How do people find my site?
Direct entry (entering URL)
Overall: 56.29%
External to the Uni only: 39.98%

External Referrer
Overall: 20.93%
External: 21.62%

Search engines
Overall: 28.66%
External 38.38%

Shows how when looking at Search Engines – for traffic from non-university computers, a large number come in from Search engines

Geographical – where are the visitors located?
Average figures usually:
UK 1st (by a long way)
US 2nd
India 3rd