Something I’ve yet to mention is that we’re adding Google Analytics to all the live Open Repository sites with the 1.4.1 release. GA has recently relaunched with a new interface and we have to say that we’re really impressed with what it does and what it can do.

You can (just) see from the screenshot of the main Visitors overview below that GA offers a host of welcome reporting tools.

GA offers three main sections:

• Visitors – where your visitors are coming from, what they’re doing and what they’re using.
• Traffic Sources –  where your traffic is coming from and which search engines are referring them.
• Content –  which pages are getting the most hits, how people move through the site and how long they stay there.

At each stage you can drill down through the layers, create different reporting views (maps, graphs etc), change the date range you’re analysing and export the results into a variety of different formats (PDF, XML, CSV, TSV). You can even customize your main ‘dashboard’ page to display the key reporting areas you require.

We’re still really enjoying playing with GA, and without wishing to descend into marketing cliche, we think you will too. It’s incredibly intuitive, very flexible and covers many of the requests made to improve the current DStat statistics reporting package (which will remain part of the Open Repository service for the moment). The DSpace community meanwhile is discussing whether or not Google Analytics could eventually replace DStat in a future release.