Analytics

1 Open your Analytics reports

Go to Left menu › Analytics. The report opens with three tabs across the top — Week, Month, and Year. Click a tab to switch between the three time windows. That is the whole page: pick a window, read the number.

2 Understand the Week, Month, and Year tabs

Each tab is a rolling window that always ends with today, so the figures are current every time you look:

• Week — the last 7 days.
• Month — the last 30 days.
• Year — the last 365 days.

"Rolling" simply means the window slides forward with the calendar. The Week tab today covers the past 7 days; tomorrow it covers a different past 7 days. It is not a fixed Sunday-to-Saturday week.

3 Know what the numbers mean

The big number on each tab is your total views for that window — the count of times pages on your site were loaded.

• A page view is counted each time a visitor opens a page. If one person opens five pages, that is five page views.
• A single visitor who browses several pages therefore adds several views. The total is a measure of overall activity on your site, not a count of unique people.

Today's activity is included and updates within about fifteen minutes, so the current window always reflects what is happening now.

4 Read the comparison to the previous period

Under the total, each tab compares the current window to the one right before it, so you can tell at a glance whether traffic is rising or falling:

• Week compares the last 7 days to the 7 days before that.
• Month compares the last 30 days to the 30 days before that.
• Year compares the last 365 days to the 365 days before that.

The comparison shows the change as a number and a percentage, and colors it to signal direction: up (more traffic than last period), down (less), or flat (about the same). If the previous period had no traffic at all — common on a brand-new site — it shows new instead of a percentage, because there is no earlier number to compare against.

5 Make sense of what you see

A few everyday ways to use these numbers:

• Check the Week tab after a big announcement. Sent a newsletter or posted an urgent alert? A rise on the Week tab tells you people are responding.
• Use the Month tab for a steadier picture. Day-to-day traffic bounces around; 30 days smooths out the noise so a real trend is easier to spot.
• Use the Year tab for the long view. It is the best window for seeing seasonal patterns and whether your site is growing over time.
• Do not over-read a single day. One quiet weekend or one busy news day is normal. Look at the direction over a period, not one spike.

6 Open the Recent Visitor Detail report

At the top of the Analytics page there are three tabs: Traffic Totals (the Week / Month / Year numbers described above), Recent Visitor Detail, and Campaigns (covered later in this guide). Click Recent Visitor Detail to see the individual visitors behind your totals.

Where the totals answer "how busy was the site," this report answers "who was here and what did they look at." It keeps the most recent 30 days of visits, newest first, and each row shows the visitor's network address, where they connected from, and which organization their internet connection belongs to — when a city hall, school district, or company network visits your site, the organization name often says so plainly.

7 Read the visitor list

Each row is one visitor for one day. A person who browses ten pages in an afternoon shows up as a single row, placed in the list by the time of their most recent visit that day — so the list stays readable even when one visitor is very active.

• If the visitor opened just one page, the row shows that page.
• If they opened several, the row shows a "Viewed 10 URLs"-style link. Click it and the full list drops open right there — every page they opened that day, with the time of each visit. Click again to close it.
• For an unusually busy visitor, the dropped-open list shows the newest visits and offers a see all visits link to that visitor's full history.

The last column, Referrer, shows the outside website that sent the visitor to you — a search engine, a social media post, or another site linking to yours. It is blank for most rows, which simply means the visitor arrived directly or moved around within your own site. Clicks that start from inside your own dashboard are treated as internal too, so previewing your pages as a staff member does not clutter this column.

Clicking the visitor's address itself opens a detail panel for that visitor: total visits, location on a map, their organization, the kind of device and browser they used, and their complete visit history for the last 30 days. If you have given the visitor a friendly name (see the "Giving a visitor a friendly name" step below), the name appears in bold on their rows with the address in smaller print beneath it.

You may also spot a small green tag next to the Referrer on some rows — that visitor arrived through one of your tagged campaign links (see "Tracking your ads with campaign links" below).

8 Understand the AI and BOT labels

Not every visitor is a person. Two small labels next to the location and organization tell you when a row is automated traffic:

• AI — the visit came from an AI company's network (such as Anthropic, OpenAI, Amazon, or Tencent) or from a known AI crawler gathering pages for AI products.
• BOT — the visit came from an automated program rather than a person: a search engine indexing your site (like Google), a monitoring service, or another kind of crawler.

Hold your mouse over a label to see exactly what was detected. A row can carry both labels at once — an AI company's crawler is both AI and a bot. Rows with no label are ordinary visitors as far as we can tell.

9 Show and hide types of traffic

Above the visitor list is a Show: bar with three checkboxes: AI, Bots, and Other traffic. All three start checked. Uncheck a box to hide that kind of visitor from the list — for example, uncheck AI and Bots to read the list as "people only."

The choice stays in effect as you page with Newer and Older. If everything on a page happens to be hidden by your current choices, a short message says so — just re-check a box to bring the rows back.

10 Give a visitor a friendly name

Once you recognize who is behind an address — a council member checking the agenda, a reporter, a vendor, a resident who calls in often — you can put a name on it so future visits are recognizable at a glance:

• In Recent Visitor Detail, click the visitor's address to open their detail panel.
• In the Name field at the top of the panel, type the name you want to see — for example Rebecca - City PIO — and click Save.
• From then on, every visit from that address shows the name in bold in the visitor list, with the address in small print beneath it. When that person comes back next week, you will know.
• To change the name, edit the field and click Save again. To remove it, clear the field and click Save.

11 Track your ads with campaign links

Running a Facebook ad? Sending a newsletter? Printing a QR code on a flyer? A campaign link lets you see exactly how many visits each one brings in. You do not need a Google Analytics account — this is built into your website.

A campaign link is just a normal page address on your site with short tags added to the end. Start with the page you want people to land on, add a question mark, then the tags:

https://www.YOURSITE.gov/parks?utm_source=facebook&utm_medium=paid&utm_campaign=summer-events

The three tags each answer one question:

Use the tagged link as the destination of your ad, the link in your email, or the address behind your QR code. Visitors who click it land on the normal page — the tags are invisible to them — and the visit is recorded under that source, medium, and campaign.

12 Read the Campaigns report

Open Left menu › Analytics › Campaigns. The page shows every campaign-tagged visit to your site:

• Pick a time range at the top — the last 7, 30, or 90 days, or the last year. Campaign history is kept permanently, so you can still look up a fall campaign in January.
• The table lists each source / medium / campaign combination with its total views and the date it was last seen, busiest first.
• Click a campaign to drill in: a day-by-day view count and the pages people landed on, so you can see both when the ad worked and where it sent people.

New clicks appear within about fifteen minutes. Visits without campaign tags are not shown here — this report only counts traffic that arrived through your tagged links, which is exactly what makes it a clean measure of each ad.