Stacks of stats (about Find & Connect web resource)

Usage of the Find & Connect web resource continues to grow, with statistics gathered from Google analytics showing a steady increase in page views and visitors over the period from 1 January – 30 May 2016.

We’ve had 97,000 visitors to the site, and 75% of these are new visitors. May has been our best month to date, with 23,000 visitors.

Most of our audience is Australian (89%), followed by the US, UK (about 6%), and, NZ & Canada (about 2%).

This is remarkable given that in the last 6 months of last year our stats were showing a downward trend.

Our most popular pages are:

• Look for homes, Look for photos, Home page (each had nearly 14,000 page views)
• Information about records, Family Tracing (nearly 12,000 views each)
• Search (11,000 views)
• Content warning (about 9,000 views) – we link to from the top of almost every page of the web resource via the “Some people may find content on this website distressing. Read more” sentence.
• Searching for a record of a parent or grandparent (8,000 views)
• About (6500 views) & What to Expect when accessing records (4,300 views).

These statistics are borne out in the feedback emails we receive. Most emails are from people who were in orphanages and children’s Homes looking for records and information, people looking for siblings, and genealogists trying to locate information about a parent, grandparent or relative.

The state based Find & Connect support services also receive a steady stream of emails, with comparatively more going to NSW (which makes sense given the size of the state and the system there).

No doubt the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse and more media coverage on the issue of child abuse has brought many more people to the Find & Connect web resource.

We have also energised our communications and social media strategy, by being more active on twitter and our blog. For more about this, see Nicola Laurent’s previous post: We couldn’t do it without you!