Downing Street publishes its own internet statistics
The figures for September are now out* (and more detailed than previous monthly figures). During the month the 10 Downing Street website got:
2,802,438 page views, with 1,048,879 visits from 842,892 unique users…
The number of Twitter followers is nearly at 1.5 million (1,427,896 as of 1 October 2009). Views of photos on Flickr during September amounted to 77,563, and have been viewed a total of 792,279 times in total. A video of Britain’s Got Talent winners Diversity performing outside Number 10 has been watched 156,345 times on YouTube.
Good to see this openness from a publicly funded website. Hopefully it is setting a trend across central government, especially given the regular controversies over the costs of some of the other central government sites.
* Note the curiously un-SEO friendly URL. Odd.
To be fair to them Mark, they’ve been publishing this data for literally years. The oldest one I can find is September 2007.
As for other sites doing so? Well, that’s a whole other can of worms. COI is pushing the notion of third-party website auditing to ensure (a) that everyone is collecting data, and (b) that it’s consistent. My minimal cost suggestion of everyone adding a couple of lines of Javascript to their web templates, and collating the data in Google Analytics or Piwik, didn’t get taken up.
Oh, and the Number10 URL structure: I’ll tell you all about that one day.
Thanks Simon. I take it thought that it’s right to say the other detail is new?
What’s the argument against everyone using Google Analytics or Piwik?
Perhaps I am too sceptical, but surely government websites that get far fewer visits than this would be much more reluctant to publish the stats?
Two points. 1) Giving data to Google or any other 3rd party could be seen as a breach of privacy and possibly fall foul of the DPA. 2) It would be really useful to see browser usage .l and operating system usage – should give British web devs a fairly representative sample.
@Terence – Hence the suggestion to use Piwik, which is open-source and self-hosted. But if we’re saying Google Analytics has DPA implications: better close that stable door quick.
For the record: Here’s my Piwik proposal.