We've all been to websites that frequently say "This sites uses Cookies".
But what does that actually mean?
Well, first things first - this site does use cookies. But not through choice. The "engine" we use to drive our site, powered by Wix, selects the cookies for us, and then presents the results of those cookies to us. Although cookies are not necessary for us to manage "www.stanwayrovers.co.uk", we can see how they would be extremely useful for companies such as global sales companies. But, having said that the cookies are not necessary for us to manage our website, they do actually provide us with some interesting (and useful) information.
So let us explain what the Wix cookies do, why they are not necessary for us, but why they would be to other companies.
The strong thing to mention now is, the cookies that Wix give us do NOT collect personal information from you. If you've looked at the cookie information from other sites, one of the types of cookies you will have seen is "Analytical" cookies, and these are the ones Wix are providing to us. And there are only four types of analysis Wix are doing for us:
How many
Location
Type of device you are using
What you are looking at on our website.
Before we start looking at these, the Wix cookies purely (and simply) count. That's it. They count. They give us numbers. Nothing else.
How Many
The first number they give us is - how many people have actually made a connection to our Stanway Rovers web site, and looked at the information we have put on there, to be looked at.
This graph tells us how many "unique" people visited our website for each day in the last three months. It collates if people visited several times on any specific day, counting that as just one unique visit per day per person. And if the same person visited on different days - again it collates, only counting them as one unique visit per day they visited.
From this we can see we had 231 different people visit us on February 18th. Although this information is not essential to us, we can see how important it would be to a company that launched a marketing campaign on a specific date, as that company would want to see if that campaign generates a lot of interest from that date onwards.
The next statistic Wix gives us: is the website getting new visitors, or are the same people visiting every day? But what is a new visit? This is the number of people that visited us in this three month period that did not visit us in the previous three month period.
Here we can see, in this three month period, we had 4,203 unique visitors and, incredibly for Stanway Rovers, 3,597 of them visited our website in this three months that did not visit us in the previous three months.
Again, this is interesting to us, but essential information for a sales company, they want to see new visitors based on new sales campaigns.
Location
Stanway Rovers is a local, amateur, community, football team based in Colchester, Essex, UK. We have nine senior football teams and over 40 youth football teams. We are also an entertainment hub, providing regular cabaret nights for the local community, So where people are accessing our website from is interesting "to us", but not essential, information "for us". And we would expect most of the visitors to our website to be from the Colchester area, and then from the wider Essex area.
But we can see how this is essential information for a company trying to do a targeted sales campaign to a specific location. They want to know their campaign is actually reaching that location and generating interest in their website from that location.
As "where you are visiting us from" is just "interesting" information for us, let's have a quick look (out of interest) to see where you are actually visiting us from. Now the statistic moves from unique visitors to visitor "sessions", where a "session is: someone looks at one part of our website (i.e. our news pages), then a bit later looks at another part (i.e. the first team results page) then a bit later looks at another part (i.e. our entertainment pages). This is one visitor, but the statistic is now three sessions.
As we can see, in the last 90 days, the 4,203 unique visitors created over 7,238 session visits to our webpages (there were 7,238 from the UK alone). In fact, we had a total of 7,373 session visits in the last three months. Again we fully expect most sessions to us to be from Colchester, then Essex, so the UK having the most sessions on our webpages is entirely expected to us. Although that is interesting - and expected, what is really interesting to us - and totally unexpected is that, in the last 90 days, we have had:
26 session visits to our website from South Korea
25 session visits from the United States
23 session visits from Russia
A count of all the countries that visited us shows we actually had session visits to our website from 27 other countries from around the globe. As we had a total of 7,374 session visits in the last three months, and 7,238 were from the UK, these other 27 countries created 136 session visits to our web site.
If you are one of these visitors from around the globe, thank you so much for taking your valuable time to visit our site. In fact, thank you to everyone that visits our site, UK or from further afield.
Again, this information is not essential to us, but we can see that a global company would be extremely interested to know where their visitors are visiting from.
Type of device you are using
The next statistic the Wix cookies gives us is: how are you visiting our website? Here we can the 7,374 sessions in the last three months. Of these, 5,648 were from mobile devices, 1,531 were from Desktop devices and 195 were from tablets.
Now this is interesting to us, and to all website designers. We all want our websites to work on all devices you use. We all have the capability to check our websites work on all device types, and this confirms we are right to put the effort in to ensure our websites work across all device types.
What you are looking at on our website.
The final statistic is: what are you looking at?
Our Stanway Rovers website is designed that every new visit goes to our home page, so it is no surprise that, in the last three months, our home page had the most visits: 3,940.
In the last three months we have put a lot of effort into improving the information our website gives to you, our visitors. So this statistic is essential information to us (and all other website designers). Are we putting in a lot of effort to improve pages that no-one actually looks at? This graph shows us that all the pages we have improved have had substantial visits - so we know we are making changes and improvements to information that you want to see. And this information encourages us to continue making improvements, to the pages that still need updating, to make this site as useful and interesting to you as we possibly can.
Comparisons
There is one other statistic that Wix gives us: how do we compare to other websites that are similar to our websites?
We have no idea how Wix generates this statistic:
is it a comparison to all websites you can Google, or Bing, or any other search?
Is it a comparison to other websites that Wix is the engine behind?
Where ever Wix is making this comparison, we can see, in the last 30 days:
we have had more unique visitors than 92% of all Sports Events, Teams and Athletes sites in the UK
with an average visit to our site being just under 3 minutes, we are better than 37% of these website types
you can see the statistics yourself above.
Summary
So that is it - we use cookies, but we do not collect any personal information.
Wix collects analytical data from your visits to our website that are, mostly, not essential to us, an amateur football club, But we can see how they would be essential to other companies.
Hopefully this helps you to trust us more with our cookies, but this does not mean you should trust every web site you visit. Please be careful out there as there are unscrupulous websites, continue to exercise care and due diligence when using the internet.
And continue visiting us, where ever you are based around the globe. We really appreciate that you are interested in us enough for you to visit our website.