"Genealogy in Hertfordshire" statistics for 2014

One of the main tasks in 2015 is to review the future of the "Genealogy in Hertfordshire" site. The support software is creaking with old age, the site itself large and has expanded to about one gigabyte, and at the age of 76 I will not be able to manage it for ever. For this reason it is appropriate to look at the recent usage statistics in some detail:

Year	Unique Visitors	No. of Visits	Repeat Visitors	Pages	Hits	Bandwidth
2010	179K	230K	51K	666K	3952K	125GB
2011	171K	236K	65K	627K	4084K	133GB
2012	177K	258K	85K	987K	4533K	154GB
2013	153K	268K	115K	838K	5046K	223GB
2014	154K	253K	99K	960K	5000K	210GB

Over the last five years the number of "Unique Visitors" has dropped while while the number of repeat visitors has effectively doubled. This is a promising development and is almost certainly due to changes in the Google search engine towards the end of 2012. The point is that most people first discover the site using Google and if you have ever used a search engine you will know that frequently you visit a page, discover it is not what you want, and immediately leave it again. The figures suggest that fewer people are finding pages on the web site in error - and more are finding it, spending more time on it, and coming back for more.This would also explain the higher number of pages visited. However all the change cannot be ascribed to google as the increasing activity of the newsletter will also have increased the accesses by genuinely interested visitors. In addition the higher bandwidth may be because I have increased the number of pictures with an accessible higher resolution copy.

Month	No URL	Wiki URL	No of Pages	No of Pictures	Most Popular	Times
January	1905	138	422	67	Newgate_Street	20
February	1844	139	359	72	St_Albans	13
March	1732	132	383	73	Ayot_St_Peter	15
April	1544	140	363	57	Westmill & Hemel Hempstead	12
May	1542	135	341	86	Thundridge	11
June	1469	139	312	20	Westmill	10
July	1537	145	343	11	Watton-at-Stone & Amwell	9
August	1631	152	361	13	Berkhamsted	10
September	1531	152	332	25	Hemel Hempstead	9
October	1566	143	313	51	Westmill	9
November	1748	145	311	27	Ayot_St_Peter	7
December	1578	134	290	28	Thundridge	16
Total			4130	550

Many people access via links from other web sites and if they visited the site using such a link there is a high chance that it is relevant. I estimate that there could be over 2,500 such links either to the home page or directly to particular topic pages. Activity tends to be higher during the winter months and the first column in the above table  shows the number of different links from external sites activated each month. The next column shows the number of different links from wiki sites (nearly all Wikipedia). In total there were 4130 times in the year a web page on the site was visited directly from a wiki site and in addition there were 550 direct picture accesses - nearly all from two education related wiki site which acknowledged the source of the pictures.

It should be noted that there are currently probably no more that 200 wikipedia pages with direct times and the number of references from places such as Westmill and Thundridge are in part due to the lack of other information and links on these Wikipedia pages. 

January	hals/famhist/	21	Each month it is possible to see what are the most popular web sites which refer people to this one. It is not surprising that the Hertfordshire page of GENUKI usually tops the list, with the family history page of the HALS web site coming next.  However a particular posting on another web site can direct a lot of extra visitors in a few days as did a LostCousins newsletter article on the Fox twins and an article on the Lost Heritage Web Site.
February	genuki/HRT/	31
March	hals/famhist/	24
April	genuki/HRT/	17
May	rootschat.com/forum/	27
June	lostcousins.com/newsletters/	96
July	lostcousins.com/newsletters/	20
August	genuki/HRT/	17
September	(Lost Heritage Web Site)	17
October	hitchinhistoricals.org.uk	13
November	genuki/HRT/	24
December	genuki/HRT/	23

The number of visitors to this Newsletter seems to have stabilized at about 7000 "page views" a month but postings are picked up on the google+ network. As reported earlier one short newsletter post has worked its way onto the front page of the Google search for the words "First World War" - and the number of people seeing the google+ version has now reached 853,514, and I am wondering if it will reach a million before it gets demoted. I suspect it has generated some extra traffic to the newsletter and the main web site. (The high number is almost certainly due to an eye-catching title ...)

In addition I currently have 74 followers on twitter at @HertsGenealogy.

A separate report is planned to look at how the site, and the way it has provided a service, has changed since it started as a bulletin board in the late 1990s.

• Note on "Unique Visitors" - A visitor is counted as unique if they only visit the site once in a calendar and will be counted several time in the year's total if they visit in separate months,  A "Repeat Visitor" is someone who visits more than once in the current month.