Capturing long-term trends in public interest in a specific topic can be challenging, but an increasingly used objective measure of engagement is tracking the level of internet traffic a website receives.  However, the approaches implemented to monitor usage statistics across Irish websites relating to nature have been mixed and inconsistent through time.  In addition, many websites are project-driven (e.g. EU LIFE-funded projects), consequently having a limited lifetime and are not maintained long-term.  To collate this indicator, the two websites chosen (the National Parks and Wildlife Service www.npws.ie and the National Biodiversity Data Centre www.biodiversityireland.ie) are publicly-funded, have been in existence for > 10 years and implement the same website usage methodologies facilitated by Google Analytics.

The number of pageviews and number of new users a website receives are two key metrics collated for the majority of websites that also correlate with internet traffic to a website, as well as with a broad range of other website usage metrics. As measured by Google Analytics, a pageview (or pageview hit, page tracking hit) is an instance of a page being loaded (or reloaded) in a browser.  Similarly, the first time a person visits a site, a Google Analytics cookie is set, and a unique identifier assigned to them thus identifying the person as a “new user”.

From 2008 to 2020, the number of pageviews and new users to www.biodiversityireland.ie has increased by 744% (2011, 177,395; 2020, 1,496,812) and 1,162% (2011, 27,087; 2020, 341,833), respectively.  Where website usage monitoring has been implemented, the number of the number of pageviews and new users to www.npws.ie has increased by 60% (2015, 606,046; 2020, 967,434) and 155% (2015, 73,224; 2018, 341,833), respectively.

IMPORTANT NOTE: In April 2020, a Guidance Note on ‘Cookies and other Tracking Technologies’ was published. This outlined The Data Protection Commission’s (DPC) regulatory role in relation to cookies and tracking technologies. The DPC is the national authority responsible for the enforcement of the EU ePrivacy Directive (2002/58/EC as amended by 2009/136/EC), and the Irish ePrivacy Regulations, implemented by Statutory Instrument (S.I.) No. 336 of 2011. The ePrivacy Regulations require that you must obtain consent to store or set cookies, regardless of whether the cookies or other tracking technologies you are using contain personal data. This means that users can choose to ‘decline’ cookies resulting in the potential for page view figures and user figures to be inaccurately recorded. This should be acknowledged when interpreting the information in this indicator for data post 2020.

For more information on Google Analytics:

https://analytics.google.com/analytics/web/