EconPapers    
Economics at your fingertips  
 

Web traffic and organization performance measures: Relationships and data sources examined

Liwen Vaughan and Rongbin Yang

Journal of Informetrics, 2013, vol. 7, issue 3, 699-711

Abstract: Unlike Web hyperlink data, Web traffic data have not yet been the focus of considerable study in Webometrics research. The relationships between Web traffic data and academic/business performance measures have not been as firmly established as the relationships between Web hyperlink data and such performance measures. Although various traffic data sources exist, few studies have examined and compared their relative merits. We carried out a study that aimed to address this lack. We selected groups of universities and businesses from the U.S. and China and collected their Web traffic data from three sources: Alexa Internet, Google Trends for Websites, and Compete. We found significant correlations between Web traffic data and organizational performance measures, specifically academic quality for universities and financial variables for businesses. We also examined the characteristics of the three data sources and compared their usefulness. We found that Alexa Internet outperformed the others.

Keywords: Web traffic analysis; Webometrics; Performance measurements; Data quality assessment (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2013
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (7)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1751157713000412
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:infome:v:7:y:2013:i:3:p:699-711

DOI: 10.1016/j.joi.2013.04.005

Access Statistics for this article

Journal of Informetrics is currently edited by Leo Egghe

More articles in Journal of Informetrics from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().

 
Page updated 2025-03-19
Handle: RePEc:eee:infome:v:7:y:2013:i:3:p:699-711