How Do We Know What Works?

Abstract

Monitoring the effectiveness of the ESA/ Hubble website2 using Google Analytics is arguably the most straightforward element of our evaluation strategy (which is just one part of the larger departmental strategy). This gives a wealth of information, not just about reader numbers for individual pages but also on the paths readers take through the website, geographical location, technical info, and many other metrics. As would be expected, the readership fluctuates considerably depending on how much Hubble appears in the news, but there is a constant baseline thanks to the sizeable archive of news stories, images and videos. Note that the materials on the site are made available for reproduction with very open licensing conditions (Creative Commons 3.0 Attribution), which encourages dissemination of Hubble science and images to a wide audience, but inevitably makes any analysis of how broadly it is used incomplete. In 2010, we ran a competition asking members of the public to identify cases of Hubble imagery in popular culture, which brought many to Introduction