Common alternative metrics of the reach of social media-based scholarship
| Source | Metric | Metric definition |
|---|---|---|
| Google Analytics | Page views | Number of times a webpage was viewed |
| Users | Number of times users from different Internet Protocol (IP) addresses viewed a site (previously termed ‘unique visitors’ by Google) | |
| Number of cities | Number of unique jurisdictions by city (as registered by Google Analytics) who viewed a site | |
| Number of countries | Number of unique jurisdictions by country (as registered by Google Analytics) who viewed a site | |
| Average time on page | Average amount of time spent by a viewer on a webpage | |
| Blog | Number of tweets from post | Number of unique 140-character notifications sent directly from the blog post via Twitter to raise awareness of a post |
| Number of Facebook likes | Number of times viewers ‘liked’ a post via Facebook | |
| Number of Google+ shares | Number of times viewers shared a post via Google+ | |
| Number of site comments | Comments made directly on the blog in the comments section | |
| Average word count per blog comment | ||
| Symplur Analytics | Number of tweets | Number of tweets linked to a specific (hashtag) topic |
| Number of Twitter participants | Number of unique Twitter participants linked to a specific (hashtag) topic | |
| Twitter impressions | Number of potential views of tweets linked to a specific (hashtag) topic that appear in users’ Twitter streams, as calculated by number of tweets per user and multiplying it with the number of followers of that user has | |
| YouTube Analytics | Number of views | Number of views of a video |
| Average duration of viewing | Average length of time the video was played with each viewing |
Adapted from Lin and Sherbino.20