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 October 2019
Quick Facts
Visits 130,848
Unique Visitors 88,819
Pageviews 480,023
Visits Per Day 4,221
Pages / Visit 3.67
Avg. Visit Duration 1:43 min
% New Visits 59%
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
Home17,092
News Details15,683
Library10,663
Utilities7,852
Utilities Outages6,721
Outages4,415
Junior Museum & Zoo3,310
Site Search3,027
Children's Theatre2,961
OverAir City Wireless2,854
Departments2,559
Main Stage Productions2,083
Pay Parking Citations On-Line2,045
Pearson-Arastradero Preserve2,038

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 utilities
city of palo alto utilities
city of palo alto red flag warning
amazon
palo alto comprehesive parking plan for downtown
city of palo alto finance committee
city of palo alto ca
mitchell park palo alto
palo alto building department
palo alto ca
city of palo alto building department
palo alto municipal code

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 iPhone31,290
Apple iPad3,357
Microsoft Windows RT Tablet915
Google Pixel 3834
Google Pixel 2582
Unknown 524
Google Pixel 3 XL498
Samsung SM-G950U386
Samsung SM-G960U378
Google Pixel 2 XL332
Samsung SM-G965U263
Samsung SM-G955U205
Samsung SM-N960U193
Samsung SM-N950U192
Huawei EML-AL00181

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

Mobile devices users are an increasingly important website visitor segment.
Browsers
DeviceVisits
Chrome53%
Safari30%
Internet Explorer7%
Firefox4%
Edge2%
Other4%

As of May 2018, Wikipedia ranks global browser popularity:

Chrome, 58%

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

Edge, 2%