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 December 2019
Quick Facts
Visits 109,498
Unique Visitors 74,387
Pageviews 404,646
Visits Per Day 3,532
Pages / Visit 3.70
Avg. Visit Duration 1:42 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
Home13,592
Library10,359
News Details7,359
Utilities5,655
Junior Museum & Zoo4,302
Children's Theatre3,896
Enjoy3,262
Utilities Outages2,569
Site Search2,486
Main Stage Productions2,448
Creek Levels2,362
OverAir City Wireless2,283
Police Report Log2,169
Police1,771

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
amazon
palo alto art center
palo alto utilities login
palo alto utilities
city of palo alto building department
palo alto california
city of palo alto utilities
palo alto creek
palo alto library
palo alto parcel report
city of palo alto jobs
palo alto ca

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 iPhone26,505
Apple iPad2,243
Google Pixel 3693
Microsoft Windows RT Tablet635
Google Pixel 2459
Google Pixel 3 XL359
Samsung SM-G960U340
Samsung SM-G950U280
Unknown 278
Google Pixel 2 XL235
Google Pixel 3a233
Samsung SM-G965U202
Samsung SM-G973U153
Samsung SM-N960U146
Samsung SM-N950U145

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

Mobile devices users are an increasingly important website visitor segment.
Browsers
DeviceVisits
Chrome52%
Safari30%
Internet Explorer8%
Firefox4%
Edge2%
Other4%

As of May 2018, Wikipedia ranks global browser popularity:

Chrome, 58%

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

Edge, 2%