Hi everyone, web admin Craig here with an update on the analytics for the fleet society website.
So far this year, the 1715 Fleet Society website is performing as follows:
- Sessions: 19k (+27.4%)
- Active Users: 14k (+29.5%)
- Bounce Rate: 39.8%(+402%)
- Views: 39k (-36.5%)
Let’s dig into the numbers here:
Sessions are a measure of a person’s engagement with our site. A session is when someone opens their browser (computer or mobile device) and visits our page — either through a web search or by directly navigating to our site. That person then navigates a few of our pages and stays logged on for a few minutes. Usually they hit the home page, then navigate to history or to the newsletter to read a few new articles. So, a single session can have multiple views, which is why the sessions metric will ALWAYS be a lower number than views. As you can see from the metrics above, sessions have increase 27.4% year over year. This is a result of our continued efforts to bring in new users across social media platform posting.
Active users are the number of unique users who engaged with our site during a specific period of time. In 2024, our active users have increased 29.5%. Again, this is due to increased posting on social media sites bringing people to the website.
Bounce Rate is the rate at which new visitors visit our site and then leave immediately. This is an indication that someone clicked on our site and then realized it wasn’t what they wanted to see. Bounce rates for sites can sometimes be in the high 90% range. Our bounce rate is very, very low – even for an established site.
Views are the individual page views a user visits during a session. A single session will usually consist of several page views. This number has gone down 36.5% over 2024. At first blush, this might seem to be a bad thing, though that’s not always the case. When both page views AND users go down, that means a site is retracting or becoming less popular. When users goes up and page views goes down it can mean a few possible things.
- People are finding us more frequently through search, but when they do click to our site they realize it’s not what they wanted and they leave immediately (this is called a bounce).
- People are finding us more frequently through search, but when they do click to our site they view just one article and leave.
- Current and returning users are not visiting as many pages as they have in the past.
#1 is not the case because our bounce rate has been reduced to just over 30%. If people visiting our site left immediately, our bounce rate would be much higher, but it’s not. It’s gone down.
#2 is somewhat true. We can see that new visitors are clicking on fewer links than before, and this is a function of Google indexing our site very well and showing people what they want to see. It’s also an indication that people are reading just what they want to see and deciding not to stick around and read other things.
#3 is also true. We can see from returning visitors that they are viewing fewer pages at each visit than before. This can happen as a site gets older. Viewers have seen what there is to see and they don’t bother re-reading articles or pictures they’ve already visited in the past. This is confirmed further in that new visitors are still looking at a similar amount of pages for each visit at the same rate they were last year.
So, while total page views have gone down, we have a very healthy site for an organization of our size and overall membership. The home page and newsletter archive page are still the two most-visited pages on the site, with the history page and gold cobs page right behind those in terms of total readership. On a very positive note, our membership page has been the fifth most visited page on our site and one of the reasons the membership of this site has grown to several hundred members worldwide in just the last few years.
Still, there are some changes to the site we’re planning to launch in the very near future that will increase page views and, more important, engagement among our users. It’s something we’ve been working on for some time and are excited to launch as these changes will bring additional functionality to the site, increase activity, and make commenting on the site easier and more accessible to members. We’ll be making a full announcement on the upcoming site changes in another post soon. Stay tuned!
