Europeana usage statistics dashboard for providing cultural heritage institutions
Thank you for your interest in our usage statistics dashboard!
The following guidance will help you to get the most out of your institution's dashboard which shows how Europeana’s audience are interacting with your institution's content on Europeana.eu. To see how much of your institution's content is on Europeana.eu then you can use our separate data statistics dashboard product.
Receiving your dashboard
You can request a usage statistics dashboard for your institution by filling in the form in the Europeana Welcome Pack.
About the dashboard
Your dashboard consists of two databoards which you can click between (also known as looped databoards). The first shows your institution's data and the second shows all data made available in Europeana.eu so you can make a comparison.
Your institution's databoard
This board shows the institution's name at the top with the Europeana logo to its left. It is important to bear in mind that if your institution has published data on Europeana.eu under different names in the past, the board may not show the usage statistics for all the name variations.
There are four metrics shown on this board in four separate widgets: No. of visits; Average Time; Bounce Rate; Pageviews.
Each databoard will be set up to show you the numbers for the last month. If you want to change the date you can do so per metric by using the dropdown next to the title of the widget.
If you want to change the date for the whole board you can do so using the grey box at the bottom right of the board. Next to this (and on each metric) you can see when the data was last refreshed.
The small dots in the centre at the bottom of the board can be used to move back and forth between your institution's board and the overall Europeana board. You can use the small arrows as well. On the far left at the bottom is the name of each board you are looking at.
Total no. of visits
This widget shows the number of visitors your institution's content measured by day. The number below the title shows the overall number of visitors in the period specified on the right of the title ‘No. of visits’.
These are all visitors that we were able to track as visiting your institution's pages; due to GDPR rules we can only track visitors who opt-in to cookie tracking so this figure is likely to be a smaller number than the ‘actual’ number of visitors. Sometimes this can be the same person coming back later on in a day or a month which means these are not true ‘unique visitors’ either but the overall number.
It is good to compare the numbers on your board with the overall number for the entire Europeana website. If Europeana.eu receives 500,000 visits a month for than 50 million item pages and editorial, and if your institution accounts for e.g. 10,000 item pages on Europeana, excluding editorial, then 100 visits per month would indicate that your content performs well compared to the Europeana average.
Average Time
This widget shows the average time which visitors (the same ones recorded in no. of visits) have spent looking at your institution's content in the period selected. You can compare with the overall Europeana.eu figure in the next databoard, but please bear in mind that the overall Europeana data includes other content from the site, not just item pages, but also blogs and other editorial content. Editorial content will have longer average visiting times due to the time it takes to read through the page.
Bounce Rate
This widget shows the percentage of people who leave Europeana after viewing one page of your institution's content. This means that they found it and then did not take another action on the page, such as downloading the item or moving to another page on Europeana. It is expressed as a percentage of all the visitors to your institution's pages.
It is not always negative if people leave quickly after finding your page. It could be that they quickly found exactly what they were looking for!
Page Views
This widget shows how many times your institution's pages are viewed per day. The large number is the total pageviews and refers to the number of page views for all your institution's item pages within the period specified next to the title Pageviews. This is different from visits, which are lower as one person can view several pages within the course of one visit.
The Europeana Board
This board has a title in the top centre which indicates that the data refers to Europeana.eu in general. The Europeana logo appears on the bottom right of the board.
There are eight metrics shown on this board in eight separate widgets: total number of visitors; average time on site; bounce rate; pageviews; downloads; click-through to provider website; visits by country; visits by channel.
Each databoard will be set up to show you the numbers for the last month. If you want to change the date you can do so per metric by using the dropdown next to the title of the widget.
If you want to change the date for the whole board you can do so using the grey box at the bottom right of the board.
The small dots in the centre at the bottom of the board can be used to move back and forth between your institution's board and the overall Europeana board.
Total number of visitors
This widget shows the number of visitors to content made available through Europeana.eu measured by day. The number below the title shows the overall number of visitors in the period specified on the right of the title total number of visitors.
As with the institution's pages, sometimes this can be the same person coming back later on in a day or a month which means these are not true ‘unique visitors’ either but the overall number.
Page Views
This is the number of Europeana.eu pages which are viewed, measured per day. The large number is the total page views and refers to the number of page views within the period specified next to the title Pageviews. This is different from the total number of visitors which are lower as one person can view several pages within the course of one visit.
Average time on site
This widget shows the average time which the visitors (the same ones recorded in no. of visits) have spent looking at Europeana.eu in the period selected. This includes all editorial content which requires a longer time to read through, in addition to the item pages.
Bounce Rate
This widget shows the percentage of people who leave Europeana after viewing one page. This means that they found a page immediately and then did not take another action on the page such as downloading something or moving to another page on the site. It is expressed as a percentage of all the visitors to Europeana.eu in the period selected.
Downloads
This is the number of times a download button was clicked in the specified period.
Click-through to provider website
This is the number of times that a visitor has clicked the link to any providing institutions’ websites in the specified period.
Visits by country
This metric refers to the number of visitors coming from the countries specified, within the selected period.
Visits by channel
This data shows us where the majority of visitors are coming from. The numbers are divided by the following sources: search engine, direct entry, social networks, websites, campaigns.
Search engines are usually a major source of traffic. These include Google and others.
Direct entry refers to visitors who came immediately to Europeana.eu without first looking elsewhere on the web. This may include visits where our tracking system could not track the source for various reasons (such as privacy issues).
Social network refers to traffic coming from Twitter, Facebook and similar.
Websites refer to the visitors who come to Europeana.eu via another website. This includes Pinterest and Wikipedia, for example.
Campaigns refer to visitors who come to Europeana.eu via special targeted links which can be used to track the performance of some specific promotional activities.
Where does the data come from?
The data we display comes from Matomo, which we use at the Europeana Foundation to track the usage of our website Europeana.eu. Matomo is an open source product which is widely used by many EU institutions to track visitors to their websites. You can read more about Matomo here.
The dashboard is made with a specialised product called Databox, which is developed by an external provider. Databox pulls the data from Matomo, so you can see the live insights into the usage of your institution's data on Europeana.
From April 13th to June 17th 2023 we did not track visitors per data provider across Europeana.eu due to technical issues. Therefore, you will notice a drop in the statistics during this period - this is the same for all data providers.
What’s next?
In our user testing we found that many people were interested in knowing which specific items were popular. Unfortunately for this version of the dashboard it was not technically possible to provide this information, nor could we show which countries visitors are coming from, which items were downloaded or which links were clicked on - segmented by specific institution's content. We are looking into how we could support this in future iterations. For now you can see this detail on the Europeana board for the whole of Europeana.eu so you can get an insight into how our website is used.
If you would like to make an additional feature request or give us any insights into how you have used this product then please get in touch with Henning Scholz at henning.scholz@europeana.eu.