Our Website Statistics
... more than you ever wanted to know.
Our Website Statistics
... more than you ever wanted to know.
The St. Joan of Arc website has actually been in existence for about 4 years. A decision was made by the Communications Committee and staff to register the domain name www.stjoan.com in 1997. However, for the bulk of that time, the website sat idle with skeleton information and virtually no traffic. In the fall of 1999 a major effort was undertaken to make the website come alive and be of value to the parish. A primary goal of the new undertaking was to use the website to foster a greater sense of community in addition to being an information conduit. While several parishioners have expressed interest in helping with the webdesign, the majority of the design is currently being done by myself. However, over 70 parishioners have agreed to act as freelance reporters/photographers for feature stories and event reviews (if you are interested in joining that group, visit this explanation). These writers and photographers are the eyes and ears of the large SJA site and have turned out some very popular pages which they send to me to format for the web. The SJA website has grown and continues to grow in content and design.
Whereas the traffic at www.stjoan.com will never rival that of microsoft.com or yahoo.com, statistics thus far are encouraging. Website statistics have no uniform method of reporting traffic. For example, many sites list "number of hits", which really is misleading. "Hits" include every downloadable file, so a given webpage with it's text file and 3 images, for example, would amount to 4 "hits". I prefer to use a more conservative and I feel realistic number, "user sessions". From January 1, 2000 to October 1, 2001, a total of 143,233 users had logged on to the SJA website. This amounts to an average of 315 users a day. These users have looked at 771,445 pages on the website. On an average day, about 1,523 pages of the SJA site are being viewed by someone. This calculates to an average of about 5-6 pages per user session. The average time spent per user session on the SJA website is almost 9 minutes.
The SJA webstatistics are improving as the pages mature in content. The first weeks of January 2000 we were averaging about 10 user sessions per day. (A "user session" is essentially one computer visiting x number of pages in a session of use.) That number has continued to rise steadily since to it's current average(10/1/01) of 315. The daily summer reports of AIDS Ride 2000 and 2001 caused great increases in viewership and those viewers have for the most part remained viewers. The October 2000 trip to South Africa, with it's across the ocean reports and the 2nd delegation from Tierra Nueva Dos, with it's daily reports caused another spike in the traffic. For the above 'big ticket items', we were averaging almost 450 visitors a day! In January of 2001, webreporters Ronnie Angelus and Edie Kalweit organized a webpage Sunday that has spiked awareness of the website as a tool for parishioners and staff. That awareness has given us a January month with the highest traffic of any month thus far despite no major events occuring. In February 2001, we began online Mass Highlights in audio/video format. These highlights include the homily and music. In May of 2001, we added online registration for Religious Ed and Event Signup. Summer of 2001 saw a slow and steady increase again with AIDRide 2001.
So, who is visiting the webpage? Probably mostly parishioners checking out the calendar, event reviews, or upcoming speakers at Mass. But, we are receiving a few visitors from all over the country as well as foreign lands. About 98% of vistors are from America. Of the 2% outside of the country, Australia, England, and Japan lead in visits. Of the American visitors, 96% are from Minnesota with the California, Georgia, and Oregon leading the outstate counts.
The most popular pages(other than the entry title page) are in order: the discontinued discussion forum, this feature section, the Events in Review section, the bulletin, Sunday Mass, and the calendar. Almost all of the pages are getting some traffic. As might be expected, the vast majority of our users are not using a search engine, but are directly entering our site. That is an indication that these are purposeful users 
who are familiar with our site. Over 5000 users have visited our site more than once. We appear to have a solid core of about 1000 users who visit the site on a semi-regular basis at this time. Most of them are local, but we have a few visitors who repeatedly check us out from outside of Minnesota. Our visitors are logging on all 7 days of the week with Sunday being the busiest and Friday the quietest.
The website is beginning to be accepted by both parishioners and staff. In the last several months, staff have used the website to post announcements and appear to feel this is a viable communication tool. Parishioner comments to the website suggest that a percentage of the parishioners are finding it useful. Some are starting to see it's potential as an immediate communication tool.
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