We were somewhat surprised by the amount of national and international traffic we received, which I largely credited to favorable Google positioning when people searched for New Hampshire Primary. Our site thenewhampshireprimary.com basically quadrupled our daily unique visitors on Primary day and gave us a nice traffic boost for about a week.

I?d say the key to our success was using a separate domain name that was well indexed by Google. We basically used http://www.thenewhampshireprimary.com as a landing page where we aggregated as much primary content as we could (Blogs, Local News, Wire Stories, Candidate Profiles, a voters guide, multimedia coverage, links into our forums, and local primary results broken out by towns in our market).

As much Search Engine optimization as possible will prove to be very beneficial to attracting new visitors.

We also tried to give the sight some personality and unique appeal by focusing on our local political writer?s blog and further building his brand as the voice off the New Hampshire Primary.

I also feel a key to our success was frequent updates but keeping our local focus with events here on the Seacoast of New Hampshire highlighted.

I agree, the traffic is typical of a big event that draws a lot of attention. And the question is a good one. How do you retain readers who may find you on a search engine and may read only one or two things. I don’t know that anyone has found a good way to do that. Remember we are operating in a world where people want access to information when, where and how they want it. I think the “brand” that is providing it only matters in terms of trustworthiness. I have read a lot lately that content is no longer king. It is the trustworthiness of the information that is king.

With all that said, I feel we offered online readers a better “experience” than any of our competitors in the state. We had interaction, engagement, blog entries, comments, the Iowa Caucus Twitter experiment feed, the Facebook group feed – all of that increased usage to our sites tremendously and helped enrich the experience.

Jason Kristufek
http://www.GazetteOnline.com
Cedar Rapids, IA

http://www.nhprimary.com
http://www.nashuatelegraph.com

To start – and this is probably typical – from any ‘big’ event we see a residual bounce, maybe 1% of an increased baseline for uniques and PV following an event surge. It is too early to say – but we hope to see that following this week’s primary as well.

Looking at our uniques on primary day – only about 20% came from NH – compared to 50% on average. (I am not counting MA traffic – though that is local for us as well.) About 40% of those NH visitors were ‘new’ monthly uniques, compared to 20% on an average day. Breaking that all down – we probably ended up with 8,000 new or at least not-recent local visitors on Tuesday.

We launched a redesign for NHPrimary last Spring, and NashuaTelegraph.com this Fall, so strategy #1 is that having a ton of new eyeballs on the site this week works simply on a marketing level. New and Improved, New and Improved!

More practically NHPrimary (which aggregated all of our political coverage) was tightly integrated with our core site features – multimedia, blogs, comments, breaking news alerts, event calendars etc. We had live blogging from around the region, 75 news updates on primary day, result charts, issue charts, candidate videos, voter resource pages, and hundreds of reader comments. So, strategy #2 – the content was useful and engaging enough to lead to future repeat visits.

It does sound rather obvious as a readership strategy: ‘build it and they will come back’ so let’s hope content is still king.

And if all else fails – we had several stories about Ron Paul that no matter what are guaranteed to draw a disproportionate amount of traffic and commentary from his supporters.

Cheers

Damon

One of the biggest items of notes for us is to make sure people understand that they can’t write in candidates. We’re heavily promoting that story and also running a cool poll on our elections page that seems to get people interacting with the page.

Key advice: Aggregation! Help your readers understand you have the good stuff (including links to other news orgs and their stories). That will keep users coming back!