Greetings 1715 Fleet Society members and enthusiasts!
This is Craig Grella, web admin. Ben Costello asked me to send a quick note with the updated website analytics. I’ve been managing the technical aspects of the website for just over five years now and it’s been amazing to see how the site has grown in that time.
1715 Fleet Society Membership
Membership to the Fleet Society was announced in November 2014. We relaunched the site soon after in January 2015 with just a few dedicated members. Today, the society numbers 123 members, with several new members joining on a regular basis. We are truly an international society with members from cities across the globe; from California to New York, from Colorado to Texas, from Massachusetts to Florida; from Nova Scotia to Puerto Rico.
If you know someone who might want to become a member, they can sign up here: https://1715fleetsociety.com/1715-fleet-society-membership/.
1715 Fleet Images, Articles, and Other Content
The 1715 Fleet Society has published 525 articles on the website in various forms including:
- Articles
- Documents
- Interviews
- Letters
- PDFs
- Photo Archives and Galleries
- Presentations
- Videos
- and User Submitted Stories
In all, the Society features nearly 4,000 high-resolution, high-quality images that bring the history of the 1715 Fleet to life in stunning fashion.
You can view all the Newsletter Updates here: https://1715fleetsociety.com/category/newsletter and you can sift through the digital archives and filter by category here: https://1715fleetsociety.com/archives/.
My personal favorite article is the Milestone 100th Member, from September 2019. The imagery is fantastic, and the recovered treasures tell such an interesting story.
1715 Featured Exhibits
In addition to the more than 500 posts and articles, the Society has published 32 additional featured items that take deep dives into individual subjects, collections, exhibits, or people involved with the Fleet and its recovery.
There’s a virtual tour of 1715 Fleet Treasure, and images of more than 1,500 coins from the State of Florida Collection and the 1715 Research Collection, among others.
This year, we added the Florida History in 3D, which has been a very popular feature.
1715 Fleet Society Web Analytics
The website has performed amazingly well over the years. It comes up as the top results for most internet searches involving the 1715 Fleet. Further, the images used on the site are nearly always the first images offered on every search engine for Fleet related terms.
In five short years, the Fleet Society website has been visited by more than 50,000 users (50,083 to be exact) and has generated nearly a quarter-million page views (230,140) as of the writing of this post. On average, a viewer reads between 3 and 4 pages, which is above average by most web standards. The readers of this site are clearly an educated and engaged group!
Most of the traffic is from the United States (86%), followed by Great Brittain (2%), then Canada, France, and Spain, each with around 1% of traffic.
Demographically, readership is split 70%/30% between male and female, and the most prevalent reading group are those between the ages of 55-64 (25%). However, the site is widely visited by all age groups and the distribution is fairly even, with the age group 45-54 making up 21%, 35-44 responsible for 16% of the traffic to the site; 25-34 year-olds making up 14%, and 18-24 year-olds making up 7%. Those 65 and up make up 17% of the site traffic.
Before the redesign in 2015 most people visited the site on their desktop browsers because that was the only way it could be viewed. The redesign made the site responsive and immediately we saw users browsing the site on mobile devices such as smartphones and tablets. Today, mobile browsers account for nearly half of all site traffic with iPhones, iPads, and Android phones being the most popular devices with which to browse the site while mobile.
It’s also important to note the way in which the Fleet Society website receives its traffic:
- 54% from organic search. That means more than half our traffic comes from people searching for fleet-related terms in their internet browsers, seeing our site in search results and then navigating to our site. This high level of organic search results means we are seen as an authority on the subject of the 1715 Fleet and fleet treasure in general.
- 30% from direct sources. That means nearly one-third of our traffic comes from people using bookmarks or typing in our site address directly. These are typically your repeat users or those who find us from some marketing material and type the web address directly into their browser. This is a huge amount of repeat and direct traffic for a website such as ours.
- Referral traffic is 10% – and that comes from links on other sites sending people to ours. We have great partnerships with other fleet sites and have enjoyed sending traffic to and from them.
- Finally, 6% of traffic comes from social media sources, which is amazing since the Fleet Society doesn’t even have any social accounts. That means our images and articles are being shared in social networks and people are finding us that way.
What’s Next for the Fleet Society
As highlighted in the previous section, social media is an area we will be spending our time this year. In the next few months, we will be creating social network profiles and starting to share more widely on those networks.
Of course, we’ll continue to expand the posts and feature the highest-quality images on the Fleet Society anywhere in the world!
We’ll also continue promoting the User Submitted Stories area of our site and would love to see more stories submitted from our readers. If you’ve got a fleet-related story, please submit it now here: https://1715fleetsociety.com/submit/. If we like it, we’ll include it on the site!
Until then, stay safe, and I look forward to updating you on web progress again soon!
Craig Grella, Web Admin
