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 July 2020
Quick Facts
Visits 129,757
Unique Visitors 88,234
Pageviews 459,683
Visits Per Day 4,186
Pages / Visit 3.54
Avg. Visit Duration 1:35 min
% New Visits 60%
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
Home14,491
News Details11,870
Coronavirus7,369
Utilities5,833
Testing5,691
Foothills Park5,639
Pearson-Arastradero Preserve5,459
MyCPAU - New Customer Site4,493
Baylands3,198
Site Search2,931
Summer Streets2,267
Building Permits2,033
Police Report Log1,849
Police1,755
Departments1,677

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
city of palo alto
palo alto
palo alto municipal code
palo alto public works
city of palo alto purchasing deparmtnet
palo alto utilities
palo alto california
palo alto police department
city of palo alto utilities
city of palo alto cafr
amazon
city of palo alto building department

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 iPhone31,931
Apple iPad1,982
Microsoft Windows RT Tablet696
Google Pixel 3604
Google Pixel 2442
Google Pixel 3 XL370
Unknown 365
Samsung SM-G960U309
Google Pixel 3a307
Google Pixel 4 XL305
Samsung SM-G950U279
Google Pixel 4251
Samsung SM-G973U227
Google Pixel 2 XL224
Samsung SM-G975U216

This month, mobile devices accounted for of website visits.

Mobile devices users are an increasingly important website visitor segment.
Browsers
DeviceVisits
Chrome52%
Safari31%
Internet Explorer7%
Firefox5%
Edge3%
Other2%

As of May 2018, Wikipedia ranks global browser popularity:

Chrome, 58%

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

Edge, 2%