During the recent winter storm, WRAL.com pulled big online traffic numbers. NMG Digital Audience Analyst Justina Kruser put together a piece for WRALWorks which she shared with capcom:
Being a Wisconsin girl, snow and freezing weather is expected. I had more cold days off of school than actual snow days. Here in North Carolina, when it snows or when snow is in the forecast, the state panics and “shuts down”. Now saying that the state of North Carolina “shuts down” isn’t a good thing, but when it comes to WRAL.com, we love it. Bad weather tends to equal more page views. WRAL.com is the #1 local website that North Carolina residents go to for weather coverage.
To put this into perspective, WRAL.com averages 2.4 million page views a day and the WRAL News App averages 500,000 page views a day. During the January winter storm, WRAL.com averaged 7.4 million page views and the WRAL News App averaged 1.8 million page views during those days. That is THREE TIMES more daily page views on both WRAL.com and the WRAL News App!
When looking at unique visitors, WRAL.com averages 317,000 unique visitors a day and the WRAL News App averages 65,000 unique visitors a day. The winter storm doubled our daily unique visitors bringing in over 703,000 unique visitors on WRAL.com and 103,000 unique visitors in the WRAL News App.
As a team, we try to plan ahead and get out in front of our advertisers with special winter weather opportunities for them to take advantage of. The winter storm alone brought in an extra $13,000 in advertising.
As Chris Weatherly, Director of Digital Sales and Products, always says on bad weather days, “Page Views, Page Views, Page Views!!”
Thanks to NMG’s Justina Kruser for this capcom story.
