This item was published during the term of a previous administration that ended in April 2007
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Web traffic remains on upward trend
26/01/2007
The Executive's main corporate website at www.scotland.gov.uk has increased its average monthly traffic for the fourth successive year, according to the latest independently audited figures.
The number of unique users in 2006 has risen 21.3 per cent to almost 498,000 a month, the number of visits by 16.8 per cent, and the number of page views by 4.3 per cent.
Minister for Public Service Reform Tom McCabe said:
"This impressive growth underlines how just how important online communication has become in explaining the actions and the policies of the devolved government.
"The website is an integral part of this Executive's commitment to openness and accountability and it seems more and more people are realising what a valuable source of information it can be."
The figures exclude users within the Executive's own staff network, estimated to be around 18 per cent of total traffic.
The audit for November 2006 was carried out by ABCe, a not-for-profit, media industry-owned organisation that provides third party auditing services.
| 2003 | 2004 | 2005 | 2006 |
Unique users | 263,628 | 292,145 | 407,053 | 493,706 |
Visits | 493,997 | 585,123 | 752,865 | 879,367 |
Page views | 2,555,628 | 3,066,295 | 3,765,658 | 3,929,497 |
The Executive was the first central government website to be independently audited, beginning in 2003.
Audited totals have all search engine robots, web crawlers and other 'non valid' traffic filtered out.