The map below illustrates website usage by state, normalized for population. An issue when analyzing website traffic by geographic region is the fact that each region (in this case state) has a different population. Thus, any interpretation of usage should take into account the difference between "higher traffic due to higher population" versus "higher traffic due to higher engagement across the population". To that end, in this particular map raw website traffic statistics from each state are normalized according to the state's total population using the following calculation:

(Total website uses per state / Total state population in 2023 ) * 1,000,000

1,000,000 was used as the population "chunk" for normalization because (as of 2023) the population of the grand majority of states (42) was over a million. Normalizing usage across state populations in this way yields a more representative metric of engagement per state than absolute usage numbers do.

For the purposes of this analysis, "usage" is assessed by a metric of "single substantive uses". A "use" is more than just a "visit". To be considered a use of a given page, the user must intentionally and substantively interact with the page in a way that 1) requires data or metadata from the database to be retrieved and/or 2) causes one of the content portions of the page to be modified or refreshed. In this sense, web page usage is not the same measure as website traffic. Website usage will always be less than or equal to website traffic. This "usage" measure is designed to be more meaningful and representative of interactive website usage than simple "visits", which may or may not involve the intentional use of the site. Thus, when bots, spiders, crawlers, and/or simply curious users visit the page without substantively interacting with it, the custom statistics engine will not record the visit as a use of the page.

SOME IMPORTANT NOTES:

• The gathering of these usage statistics began in 2017 for some websites and pages, but the majority of pages were not tracked until sometime in 2019, and tracking could not begin on pages developed during or after 2019 until the page was published to a production website. As a result, websites developed later (TSS and IWDW) may be under-represented in these statistics relative to earlier websites (FED).
• These statistics are not part of Google Analytics, but are custom metrics that have been designed to more precisely capture fine-grained usage in a way that is not always easy or even possible with Google Analytics.