Pawtuckaway Lake Association

Since we moved the web site to our new hosting company SiteGround in July of 2006 we have had access to a wide variety of statistics about the visitors to our web site. Apart from the surprising number of site visits we log each month (the average is around 1,300 visits a month), it is amazing where all these visitors are all coming from. 97% of our visitors are from the USA and the other 3% come from 31 other countries! Even though September isn't over and all the statistics aren't in, I thought this information was interesting enough to discuss anyway.

The follow is a list of countries that visit our site in order of the greatest number of visits:

Here is the total count of visitors each month. The web site knows if you have been to the site on the same day and doesn't count you twice. That is why the Total Visits number is higher than the Unique Visitors number. So, its clear that almost half of our visitors return to the web site twice during the day.

One of the statistics that I pay attention to is the average amount of time a visitor spends on the web site. This statistic tells you alot about how people feel about the content on the site. People have so little time these days that if they are willing to spend a significant amount of it reading information on our web site then we must be providing something worth reading. Conversly, if they are visiting the site for less than a minute or two, then either they didn't find anything of value and left or they arrived on our site by mistake. The following table shows how long visitors spend on our site. For example, in July 16% of visitors spent greater than 15 minutes on the web site in one visit.

Considering we are a small web site, about a small lake, in a small state, in a small town, and we have no budget to speak of, I think that roughly 40% of visitors spending greater than 2 minutes on the site each visit is a good number. Even more promising is that over 20% spend greater than 5 minutes each visit. Some of the short visits may be due to people checking to see if there is new content on the site and leaving if there isn't. (Hint: look at the Latest Articles list on the main page of the web site to see if anything new has been posted that you haven't read). There's always room for improvement but, these numbers mean that people like Pawtuckaway Lake, even if they have to visit it over the web!

People always ask what kind of computers our visitors are using to access our web site. The following table is a breakdown of operating systems our visitors are using. Microsoft based PC's continue to dominate but, as you can see, there are other computers out there visiting us as well.

This table shows where people are coming from when they arrive at our site. The vast majority have our web site added to their Favorites, which is great. The next largest group types our web address directly into their browser. A smaller number find us by search engines. What I think this means is that most people learn about our site from word of mouth, which I find that amazing. We have alot of search engines cataloging our site every day. I think the large number of visitors we get attracts them.

Well, I hope you enjoyed looking at the web site statistics as much as I do. And, to all your faithful visitors from around the world, Thank You, Cheers, Danke, Tack, Grazie, .....

Jeff Gurrier

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