Has website traffic increased due to people being snowbound?

[Anonymous]

Just curious.

[Anonymous]

I would guess it has.

[jsteele]

I really won't know until tomorrow when I can see the complete day's stats. Yesterday was slightly less traffic than a normal Friday. Weekends are normally slower than week days (by quite a bit). My guess now is that today will be almost the same as yesterday, which would mean more traffic than a normal Saturday, but less traffic than a normal weekday.

[Anonymous]

Jeff, can you give us an update on this?

[jsteele]

Anonymous wrote:Jeff, can you give us an update on this?

Yes, this storm has been good for us. If I take the period from Friday (the day the storm began) until yesterday and compare it with the Friday - Wednesday period from the previous week, usage was up every day. One noticeable thing -- basically what I suggested in my earlier post -- is that weekend usage was similar to a normal work day. However, even the works days (which probably weren't work days for most people) were up.

Overall, we had about 3% more users during the storm then during the non-storm period. We had about 1% more sessions. Pageviews and pageviews per sessions were actually down about 6%. But, the percentage of new users increased by 2%. So basically, more users were using the site more often, but reading fewer pages during their visits.

Obviously, none of these numbers are very large and some fluctuation is normal. I'm glad to have had any growth at all since days that people are off work are generally like weekends which are lower traffic than work days.