This item was published during the term of a previous administration that ended in April 2007
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Website traffic on upward curve
25/02/2005
The Executive's website
www.scotland.gov.uk
is now recording more than 3 million page views and over
290,000 unique visitors in a month, according to an
independent audit.
This is the second audit of the Executive's corporate
website and the findings show that there has been an
increase of nearly 20 per cent in pages viewed and over 10
per cent in the number of unique users.
The increase in viewing figures continues the upward
trend in traffic coming to the Executive website since it
was revamped in September 2001. The topic structure was
introduced in 2003 and a partial re-design carried out
following a users' survey in 2004.
The audit was carried out by ABC Electronic, the
not-for-profit, media industry-owned organisation that
provides third party auditing services.
ABCe have now conducted audits of the Executive website
during the month of November in 2003 and 2004. This allows
direct comparisons to be made of the figures. Full details
are given below (figures in brackets are for 2003).
- Page impressions
3,066,295 (2,555,628)
- Unique Users
292,145 (263,628)
- Visits
585,123 (493,997)
- Visitor Sessions
1,745,430 (1,451,769)
- Average visit duration 606 seconds (550
seconds)
In layperson's language this means the site receives an
average of 19,500 visits requesting 102,210 pages of
information every day.
The Executive are the only central government website
that uses an independent audit of its website traffic.
Audited totals have had all search engine robots, web
crawlers and other 'non valid' traffic filtered out.
Minister for Finance and Public Service Reform Tom
McCabe said:
"The website is an integral part of the Executive's
commitment to openness and accountability. It is a source
of the most up to date and relevant information on
Executive policy and Ministerial activity.
"These growth figures provided by an independent audit,
prove that the public is coming to the website in
increasing numbers because they are finding the information
that they want."