Baseline data on local authority websites in Wales
We’re repeating our (my) work from 2015 to ask local authorities for some basic visitor data. It was a big administrative hassle I have to say. So this year we’re taking it steady. We’re just looking at Wales. We might (probably will) roll on to other parts of the UK in due course.
This got me looking at the data for Welsh local authorities I gathered back then. Because now we’ll be able to see how things have changed.
I wasn’t able to get a response from Blaenau Gwent and Anglesey Councils back then so they weren’t included in the stats.
So here are 3 key stats from 2015
Visits
That sounds like a lot. But is it? By comparison there were 659,000,000 visits to local authority websites across Great Britain in that year. That’s a lot, but Wales is quite small.
Visits per head
Thanks to the lovely ONS it is trivially easy to find out what the population of Wales was in 2015. And from that I can tell you there were 8.9 visits per head. That’s below the level of 10 per head that was the average for the whole of Great Britain.
Visits by device
Most visits to Welsh local authority websites in 2015 were on desktop PC. Mobiles only represented 25% of visits. That was broadly in line with Great Britain overall at the time. (58% and 27% respectively). I’m going to be really curious to see how these figures change.
What happens next
If you work in a digital / web team in local government in Wales you can expect a request for data to come your way via your FOIA team.
There’s more information on the website analytics research on this post from Luke Piper. Please do get in touch with any questions, comments or suggestions (or if you’d like to sponsor any of our reports).
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I work at The Satori Lab we also host ODI-Cardiff.
