Archived: Web Analytics – Over 100m visits in September

With the TfL website having now been live for around 18 months, the Analytics team within TfL Online are continuing to see increased levels of traffic arriving on the site and in September we achieved a notable landmark.

With over 100 million pages accessed in the month, September was the first time this year that we’ve surpassed 100m page views without a strike occurring in that month. In comparison with September 2014, we saw a year-on-year increase of 10% as our site received a staggering 23.2 million visits during the month:

September 2015 saw a rise of +10% year on year, with the site receiving over 23.2 million visits during the month.
September 2015 saw a rise of +10% year-on-year, with the site receiving over 23.2 million visits during the month.


The year-on-year graph below shows that in terms of all our key audience and traffic metrics, the performance of the TfL website has seen a significant increase when compared with September 2014:

All website traffic metrics have increased year-on-year
All website traffic metrics have increased year-on-year
Visits Unique Visitors Page Views
Sep 2014 21,113,565 9,939,206 97,806,073
Sep 2015 23,265,043 10,486,473 100,764,451
Variance 10.19% 5.51% 3.02%

 

Daily Visits

Historically we have tended to see a lower number of site visits over weekends, with the busiest times usually at the start of the week. However, the last Friday in the month had the greatest daily traffic day with over 841,863 visits. On that day there was an increase in journey planning and we also saw increased numbers of people looking at Tube, DLR, Overground and traffic status updates.

September 2015: TfL Visits by Day
September 2015: TfL Visits by Day

 

Site Sections

As we’ve seen, overall performance across the site in general was up year-on-year, and this was also something that filtered down to specific areas of the site.

September expectedly saw a seasonal shift from the kind of visitor-related information we expect to be in high demand during the summer, towards content related to our customers returning to work or school, and again, consumption of this type of content is on the increase:

  • Timetabling functionality has increased, with Tube timetable visits up 20% to 198,000 and bus timetabling up an incredible 125% from 115,000 to 259,000.
  • Visits to pages with first and last Tube information rose 69% year-on-year to 105,000.
  • Fares and ticketing, and specifically Oyster and Ticket Types pages rose 26% and 34% (186,000 and 225,000 visits respectively).
  • Our improved Help and Contact area provided 138,000 additional visits.

Finally, September 2015 saw an uplift in visits to pages containing campaign related information, and the visits to this area rose 114% from 156,000 to 334,000. The top performers for September were:

  1. The future of the Tube: Night Tube – 90,000 visits
  2. Ways to pay – 64,000 visits
  3. Rugby World Cup – 53,000 visits

 

Device Types

The number of visits made by mobile phone is at 54%, 9% higher than it was this time last year, and this further supports the ever-growing trend of increased use of the website from mobiles compared to desktop computers.

The below chart shown the breakdown by device, highlighting the year-on year increase:

Device Type September 2015 Visits September 2014 Visits
Mobile Phone 12,506,825 9,556,560
Desktop 8,656,030 9,367,240
Tablet 2,068,641 2,150,340
Media Player 30,588 37,056
Gaming Console 2,845 2,192
EReader 92 156
Set-top Box 22 21
Total 23,265,043 21,113,565

 

Source: Adobe Site Catalyst

8 Comments

  1. Are these figures purely from website views directly to the TfL site or do they include access via e.g. the API or embedded pages?

    Personally, I was looking for some change in the ratio of page views to visits, and was then going to make that point that if visitors were now accessing, say, 6 pages per visit after the redesign as opposed to 4 pages per visit before then how does one know if that’s down to more positive engagement (following an interesting link after they’ve found what they were looking for) or down to a more frustrating user experience (can’t find the information I wanted on this page, so I’ll try another)? It’s a metric I use for the sites I maintain; I think it correlates to “clicks to reach target”, which I try to minimise. I’m sure other strategies exist (e.g. someone who gets revenue from ad serving might wish to maximise that value whilst retaining a return audience).

    It turns out that both views/visitor and views/unique for the TfL pages are about the same from 2014 to 2015. Trouble is, those don’t cover the major bits of the redesign. I wonder what the figures that DO cover the redesign would show? If I could be bothered, I might have tried to find it myself.

      1. Thanks for pointing that out, I’ve added the ‘Press this’ button to the other social media sharing buttons so you can now share to WordPress.

  2. Hi Stephen. I am working on a redevelopment of the Metlink website (www.metlink.co.nz) which provides public transport information for Wellington, New Zealand covering trains, buses and ferries. The team involved in the project have all left so I am working through why information architecture and design decisions were made. The main feature of our website is a journey planner and I think this might have been inspired by the plan your journey feature on your website. I was hoping you may share some statistics on the usage of this tool on your website? On the metlink site less than 0.5% of page views involve using the journey planner despite it occupying such a prominent position on our home page but we live in a much smaller and less complex city than London.
    Thanks Janet Skilton

    1. Hi Janet. With the size of our city and complexity of possible journeys across various modes of transport (Tube, bus, DLR, Overground, trams, National Rail and so on) Journey Planner is the most visited page on our site. To give that some context, there were 20m visits to the site in December, with about 8m visits to Journey Planner – so a huge 40% of all visits. Hope that helps, and good luck with the redevelopment of your site.

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