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 May 2020
Quick Facts
Visits 141,547
Unique Visitors 94,422
Pageviews 512,841
Visits Per Day 4,566
Pages / Visit 3.62
Avg. Visit Duration 1:42 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
News Details15,973
Home15,510
Coronavirus11,734
Pearson-Arastradero Preserve7,889
Foothills Park6,835
Utilities6,467
MyCPAU - New Customer Site5,106
Baylands3,951
Site Search3,060
Council Agendas2,941
Budget2,613
City Council / CAO2,488
MyCPAU2,298
Police Report Log1,987
What's Open/Changed?1,896

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 california
lucie stern community center history
palo alto
palo alto utilities
palo alto building department
planetbids palo alto
palo alto housing inventory
City of Palo Alto
palo alto police department
foothills park
palo alto smoke detector ordinance
city of palo alto building department
peers park 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 iPhone34,180
Apple iPad2,382
Microsoft Windows RT Tablet927
Google Pixel 3817
Google Pixel 2532
Google Pixel 3 XL414
Google Pixel 3a399
Unknown 344
Samsung SM-G960U341
Samsung SM-G950U326
Google Pixel 4 XL301
Samsung SM-N900T285
Google Pixel 4271
Google Pixel 2 XL238
Samsung SM-G965U236

This month, mobile devices accounted for 32% of website visits.

Mobile devices users are an increasingly important website visitor segment.
Browsers
DeviceVisits
Chrome47%
Safari32%
Internet Explorer8%
Firefox8%
Edge2%
Other3%

As of May 2018, Wikipedia ranks global browser popularity:

Chrome, 58%

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

Edge, 2%