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 new users a website receives are two key metrics collated for a 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, identifying the person as a “new user”.

Over the past 10 years, 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.  Over the past six years 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.

For more information on Google Analytics:

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