I made a couple of time-of-day plots with Google Analytics from both before and after the switch to WordPress. The switch also coincided with the newsroom’s move to a web-first strategy. I’d guess the latter has more to do with these numbers than the former.
Visual #1: The eight-day period before May 1, when we were on CollegePublisher5 and primarily shoveling content onto it:
Time-of-day traffic summary from before the switch.
Primarily morning traffic, trailing off around noon. Not much readership in the evening — but also no content in the evening.
Visual #2: The past week with WordPress and a web-first (mostly) newsroom:
After the switch.
Big clump of traffic in the 6 p.m. to 9 p.m. range. Wow.
I hesitate to conclude anything, especially on such a small data set, but to see a 50 percent traffic increase and a lot more evening traffic, it seems reasonable to think that the change in publishing schedule is benefiting us — and the people who are kind enough to visit us, if they’re reading our stuff 15 hours earlier.
I’ll try to do this again in a week or two and see what longer time comparisons show. There’s surely some random variables that can’t be separated (Osama bin Laden, for one).
Even if these numbers are simply coincidence, I think the Emerald’s Internetness is getting much better. We’ve got hyperlinks, yo.
