As you might expect we saw increased traffic to BillTrack50 during the midterms, but even we were surprised by how much. I thought you might enjoy a quick little tour of how the season looked to us, just based on traffic.
First, the most obvious question, how many users did we have?
The blue line is the same days last year. The peak was on election day and google helpfully tells us we saw a 1,152% increase in traffic. After a couple tweaks we felt we were able to keep the site running just about as fast as it ever does, do it’s nice to know we have that much room to grow. It is also nice to know so many people wanted to look up bills and legislators ahead of voting.
Second, where did users come from?
This map looks pretty much like a heat map of population (or electoral votes) so interest seems pretty even across the country with perhaps some extra emphasis on California.
What were people looking at?
Mostly bills. The green slice, “sharing” is people who clicked through from a bill widget, stakeholder page, or map. So all of you that are sharing bills on your website, it looks like people are genuinely interested in what you have chosen to post. Along those same lines, here are hits on our database directly — not people on our website, but people on your website pinging us to populate a widget:
As you can see there was significant traffic back and forth the BillTrack50, building up starting a few weeks before the election. So congratulations to all of us for keeping people informed! And especially to people for wanting to be informed.
But yes we felt a little like this