Toronto Meal Programs (the website) passes the 10,000 visits mark

Now that the site has passed the 10,000 visits mark, it's time to release a bit more information about how people find the site.

The keyphrase at the root of most searches that bring people to this site is: "free meals toronto."

Several other keywords have revealed themselves to be important: Food, Laundry, Meals, and certain days of the week, specifically Saturday, Sunday, and Monday.

The question is, are these keywords an indication of a bias towards these words in the site's content, or of the users' needs? Are we not seeing any popularity of "tuesday" in searches because there don't happen to be any articles on the site mentioning tuesdays? Or is it because saturday, sunday and monday are when people need meal programs the most, or when they're the least available? It's unclear. However, based on what little knowledge can be extracted from these statistics, a few ideas may be implemented:

Maybe some articles about food-gathering strategies for the various days of the week would be useful. And maybe expanding more into food-related topics beyond meal programs, and other services like laundry and communications access, would add value to the site. Expanding on listings of a broader range of services was already part of the plan, but the idea of articles for each day is a new one, specifically inspired by these stats. It's nice to have some stats, and for sites with no budget, it's great to have it included automatically, like it is in Blogger.

Here's some other fun stats:

This past month, the calendar was visited about 300 times. The map, not so much. It only got about 20 views. Over the whole history of the site, the map gets about one eighth the number of visits that the calendar does.

It's unclear how many individual users the site has, or how the user group breaks down in terms of how often they use the site. Stats indicating those facts are not available.

On average, the site gets between 8 and 30 visits per day. The site is probably more active during the latter half of each month. This is indicated but not quite verifiable in the available stats, and it also mirrors activity at meal programs. It's reflective of the social benefits payment schedule. Welfare recipients get paid near the end of the month, and Disability recipients get paid right at the end of the month, and both sets of benefits cover about a third of a person's monthly food needs. The tendency is to take a vacation from soup kitchens until the grocery money runs out, and then scramble to cover the discrepancy.

The site's activity has increased incrementally since it was first published in 2007:

From the looks of the chart, it really started to take off in 2011.

Well, those are some of the conclusions we can glean from Google's barebones but nicely-illustrated web stats. If you notice anything else about them that could lead to decisions on content or design, please leave a comment on this article.