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 March 2020
Quick Facts
Visits 160,080
Unique Visitors 104,657
Pageviews 538,495
Visits Per Day 5,164
Pages / Visit 3.36
Avg. Visit Duration 1:27 min
% New Visits 57%
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
Coronavirus38,455
News Details22,920
Home19,231
Utilities5,333
Library4,996
Support Local Business4,229
Pearson-Arastradero Preserve4,223
Site Search3,055
Foothills Park2,952
Open Space and Parks2,292
Police Report Log2,283
Baylands2,127
OverAir City Wireless1,937
Police1,878
Pay Parking Citations On-Line1,778

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 enjoy catalog
palo alto utilities
city of palo alto agenda minutes
city of palo alto utilities
online parcel report palo alto
palo alto police department
city of palo alto smart energy provider award
mitchell park community center palo alto
boy scouts palo alto lucie stern 1940
city of palo alto city council meeting
palo alto art center
palo alto building department
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 iPhone44,709
Apple iPad3,150
Microsoft Windows RT Tablet1,107
Google Pixel 31,029
Google Pixel 2732
Google Pixel 3 XL599
Samsung SM-G950U554
Samsung SM-G960U500
Unknown 426
Google Pixel 3a422
Google Pixel 2 XL363
Google Pixel 4322
Samsung SM-G965U307
Apple iPhone X293
Google Pixel 4 XL283

This month, mobile devices accounted for of website visits.

Mobile devices users are an increasingly important website visitor segment.
Browsers
DeviceVisits
Chrome48%
Safari35%
Internet Explorer6%
Firefox4%
Safari (in-app)3%
Other4%

As of May 2018, Wikipedia ranks global browser popularity:

Chrome, 58%

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

Edge, 2%