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 September 2020
Quick Facts
Visits 109,940
Unique Visitors 74,744
Pageviews 429,099
Visits Per Day 3,665
Pages / Visit 3.90
Avg. Visit Duration 1:45 min
% New Visits 58%
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
Home13,649
News Details13,591
Utilities5,401
Testing5,121
Foothills Park3,686
Pearson-Arastradero Preserve3,651
Coronavirus2,912
Site Search2,727
Baylands1,919
Building Permits1,759
Human Resources1,750
Police Report Log1,723
DS Online Permitting Services1,633
Police1,499
OverAir City Wireless1,473

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
alo alto parcel reports
city of palo alto
palo alto municipal code
site:www.papd.org
site:papd.org
site:www.pafd.org
city of palo alto planetbids
colorado substation in palo alto ca
palo alto
palo alto police department
site:pafd.org
city of palo alto budget
palo alto utilities
bmr purchase palo alto

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 iPhone25,526
Apple iPad1,634
Microsoft Windows RT Tablet617
Google Pixel 3464
Google Pixel 2331
Samsung SM-G950U252
Unknown 247
Google Pixel 3 XL244
Samsung SM-G960U242
Google Pixel 3a241
LG LM-X220182
Google Pixel 4181
Google Pixel 4 XL176
Samsung SM-G965U174
Samsung SM-N960U172

This month, mobile devices accounted for 31% of website visits.

Mobile devices users are an increasingly important website visitor segment.
Browsers
DeviceVisits
Chrome56%
Safari30%
Internet Explorer4%
Firefox4%
Edge3%
Other3%

As of May 2018, Wikipedia ranks global browser popularity:

Chrome, 58%

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

Edge, 2%