Hello, this is Craig Grella – I’m the website manager for The 1715 Fleet Society. I am also the executive director of OrgSpring, a nonprofit web development and management company based in Pittsburgh, PA. In December 2014 OrgSpring redesigned this website and then re-launched it in January 2015. Now, one year later, we’ve put together a 1715 Fleet Society Website Analytics Update to show you how far the site has come in the past year.
We compared the last six months of website traffic to the first six months of website traffic since we took over management of the site.
Over the first six months of operation, the 1715FleetSociety.com website was viewed by 3,327 visitors. In the most recent six months, the site was viewed by 8,407 visitors, an increase of 152.69%. That means during the course of the year, site readership increased dramatically.
Over the first six months of operation, the 1715FleetSociety.com website received 22,903 pageviews – this is the number of pages on the site that were viewed by all its visitors. In the most recent six months, the pageviews numbered 43,366, which is an increase of 89.35% over that six month period. This means that over the year the number of pages being viewed by visitors has nearly doubled.
The site has been averaging just over 7,000 pageviews a month, for the past 6 months. That translates to just over 233 visitors a day to the site. However, during the 300th Anniversary week of commemoration (July 27 – 31, 2015), traffic grew to between 900 and 1,700 pageviews per day. That month, the site received almost 18,000 total pageviews, which is a staggeringly high number of page views for a site of this type.
In web analytics, bounce rate is a measure of the percentage of visitors which arrive on the site and then immediately leave the site. It can be an indication of someone arriving at the site by mistake. During the same time period mentioned above, the bounce rate of the site dropped by nearly 10%. This a good thing – it means that fewer people left the site once arriving there. This is an indication that our content is being properly optimized and displayed more prominently in search engines when visitors search for keywords related to the Fleet Society.
When we look at these measurements together, we find a site with a healthy and growing readership; comprised of visitors who are finding our content more readily, and, after arriving at our site, are staying longer and reading more content. As a result, our readers have left more than 60 comments on site, creating an active dialogue around the 1715 Fleet and its many treasures.
The Future of the 1715 Fleet Society Website
Our goal with the site is to help the directors increase traffic to a point where we are regularly receiving 10,000 pageviews per month. It’s going to take some work, but with frequent posting and a dedicated readership we have no doubt we will reach our goal!
