OA Book usage data – How close is COUNTER to the other kind? compares COUNTER Code of Practice Release 5 with Google Analytics (GA) as usage metrics. In this study, the number of COUNTER 5 item requests counted were only 58% of GA downloads recorded for the same body of ebooks. GA data shows usage of the books in the sample being dominated by U.S. users, however, the COUNTER 5 data does not show the same pattern. The COUNTER 5 algorithm filters out downloads by users who download more than 40 items per day which filters out use that might be data mining ebooks rather than using them in a traditional way. COUNTER 5 also filters out users who download the same publication more than 10 times in a day. This behavior might be related to educational activities such as presentations directing users to these online resources on a given day. Given the differences in the algorithms, the discrepancies between GA counts and COUNTER 5 counts are not consistent across titles. Sometimes GA stats are higher and for other titles COUNTER 5 stats are higher. Which one is more appropriate depends on what you want to count as usage.
