Analysis of the scientific organization website popularity by means of different systems for collecting statistics

The increasing popularity of web applications and the Internet is associated with the modern level of information technologies development. Websites play a significant role in the development of modern organizations, as they have extensive functionality and help automate and improve many conducted processes. Scientific organizations also pay close attention to the support, development and promotion of own websites. This is caused by the fact that the number of mentions about an organization in the media and the attendance of official websites on the Internet are included in the project of the system to evaluate the performance of a scientific organization proposed by the Ministry of Education and Science of the Russian Federation and taken into account in the assessment of the activities of a scientific institution. This is particularly important in connection with the ongoing reform of academic science, namely, the reorganization and transition to competitive financing of scientific institutions, as well as with the desire to expand international scientific cooperation and include Russian universities and research centers in foreign databases and ratings. Thus, to date, the website does not only serve as a platform for posting information, but also contributes to the formation of single information space uniting numerous web resources that reflect a wide range of activities of scientific institutions. Taking into account the importance that webometric rankings have today, paying attention to the role of search engines in determining the rank of an organization, to analyze the popularity of a website one should pay attention to statistical data obtained by means of different systems. The article substantiates the necessity to assess the popularity of the website of a scientific organization, including with the help of different systems for collecting statistical information. It identifies the approaches to the collection of statistical data. It touches upon services, such as Yandex.Metrica and Google Analytics, and their capabilities. The paper shows the analysis of the popularity of the Internet portal of the Institute of Socio-Economic Development of Territories of the Russian Academy of Sciences by criteria, such as a number of page views and a number of unique users. It considers statistical data on the main Institute’s website, the website of the scientific journal “Economic and Social Changes: Facts, Trends, Forecast”, the Research-Educational Center of Economics and Information Technology of the Institute of Socio-Economic Development of Territories of the Russian Academy of Sciences. It presents the comparison of statistical data and possible reasons for the differences. In conclusion it summarizes results of the analysis. It mentions features of counting the statistics of website attendance by various services, the need for such an analysis, the usefulness of upgrading the existing Internet portal of the Institute of Socio-Economic Development of Territories of the Russian Academy of Sciences and continuing research in this area.