About This Website

As part of the City's ongoing commitment to improve the City website, staff enlisted a group of community volunteers to serve on a Website Advisory Committee with the goal of producing a set of recommendations to address concerns raised by citizens and enhance the overall website user-experience. The Website Advisory Committee, comprised of a select group of dedicated community volunteers, has met regularly during the past three years to help City staff with the creation of our present website.

Below you will find statistics about the performance of this site. The statistics are updated on a monthly basis for the prior month's activity. To the left are buttons to take you to information about the ongoing maintenance of this website, Ways to contact the City of Palo Alto about this website, and legal information.

Data For Month of December 2020
Quick Facts
Visits 129,736
Unique Visitors 92,603
Pageviews 543,092
Visits Per Day 4,185
Pages / Visit 4.19
Avg. Visit Duration 1:30 min
% New Visits 65%
The "Quick Facts" section provides "at a glance" information about this website.

Note: When somebody comes to this website, that constitutes a "visit". If the same person (from the same computer) visits again, that visit is counted again, but the "Unique Visitors" number does not increment, it counts two visits from the same computer in a certain period as one visit.
Top Pages
PageUnique Views
News Details31,575
Foothills Park16,116
Home13,171
Testing8,783
Pearson-Arastradero Preserve8,745
Coronavirus5,088
Utilities4,591
Site Search2,327
Baylands2,230
Resource Record1,834
Police Report Log1,806
Dogs1,415
Departments1,368
Police1,357
Building Permits1,330

With website metrics, a trend is generally more useful than any one snapshot in time. This information can be very useful in helping City Staff to determine what information visitors are looking for the most.

The Home Page of this site has a "Most Popular" corner, but it is a curated list, whereas these results are based on raw data.
Top Referring Keywords
site:papd.org
palo alto
foothills park
jonathan lait palo alto
palo alto municipal code
city of palo alto
city of palo alto utilities map request
palo alto police department
site:pafd.org
site:www.papd.org
city of palo alto jobs opportunities
city of palo alto staff reports
city of palo alto utilities
palo alto arts center testing
palo alto foothills park

When visitors come to the website as a result of a Google search, analytics captures the terms the visitor entered to find the site. This report helps City Staff determine visitor's interests in both the short (monthly) and long (annual) term.

New site content is one outcome of analysis of this report. Another outcome is the addition of keywords to commonly sought after pages to make them more easily found by a search.
Mobile Devices
DeviceVisits
Apple iPhone36,684
Apple iPad2,024
Google Pixel 3803
Microsoft Windows RT Tablet507
Google Pixel 3 XL403
Google Pixel 2385
Google Pixel 3a378
Google Pixel 4355
Samsung SM-G960U345
Google Pixel 4 XL323
Google Pixel 4a314
Google Pixel 5291
Samsung SM-G950U270
Unknown 257
Samsung SM-G973U243

This month, mobile devices accounted for 37% of website visits.

Mobile devices users are an increasingly important website visitor segment.
Browsers
DeviceVisits
Chrome51%
Safari36%
Internet Explorer4%
Firefox3%
Edge3%
Other3%

As of May 2018, Wikipedia ranks global browser popularity:

Chrome, 58%

Safari, 14%
Firefox, 5%
IE, 3%

Edge, 2%