stats from the Philadelphia FIRST website

[Dan Zollman]

We've been using Google Analytics on the Philadelphia FIRST site since late February, with some interesting results. I thought some people might be interested in seeing them. The most suprising result is that roughly 1 in 8 visitors were using Internet Explorer 6.

The regional went from March 25 to 27. Between March 1 and April 1, the site had 3,000 visits; 2,000 unique visitors; and 13,800 page views.

Internet Explorer was reponsible for 49% of the visits. Of those, 38% visits were from IE8, 37% from IE7, and 25% from IE6. This means that a significant percentage of the FIRST community (including volunteers, judges, sponsors, families) still uses IE6 regardless of which browser they actually prefer.

I think IE6 support is still worthwhile for FIRST team sites, but it's still extremely important that you know your audience before making the decision, one way or the other. Google Analytics is a great way to find out what kind of support your visitors need.

In addition to the 49% of visits from IE, Firefox was used for 28% of visits, Safari for 15%, and Chrome for 7%.

3.32% of all visits--100 visits--were made from mobile devices, including 68 from iPhone and iPod, 16 from Android, and 12 from Blackberry. The site does not have a separate mobile version or even a mobile stylesheet, but I might consider it for next year.

47% of visits were direct (i.e. the visit went directly to the website rather than coming via a link from Google or another website). 35% came from Google, 3.5% from ChiefDelphi, 2% from moe365.org, and 1.6% from Bing.

Out of roughly 13,800 page views, the home page received 2,800, and the pages related to the regional competition received 7,900. Thus, the informational pages about FIRST only received about 12% of page views.

The vast majority of visits occurred during the week of the regional competition. The second day of the regional had the greatest number of visits.
March 1 to 17: between 20 and 50 visits per day
March 18 to March 23: 80 to 170 visits per day
March 24: 254
March 25 (day 1): 323
March 26 (day 2): 507
March 27 (day 3): 349
March 28 to April 1: steady decrease from 120 to 20
Since April 1: 10 to 15 per day