Here at BillTrack50, we like to keep an eye on our website traffic using Google Analytics, which surely comes as no surprise. Leading up to the election we had a big spike in traffic, to record levels for us. The day before the election is still the biggest day we’ve ever had. 
Of course we were happy to be helping so many people research their legislators. We have chosen to make BillTrack50 free to use for precisely this reason, so citizens can use our tools to become more informed. Since we mostly provide state level information and nothing at all about the executive branch, we were really encouraged to have so many Americans doing their homework on their representatives before election day.
Feeling good about ourselves, and our fellow citizens, we didn’t feel too bad when traffic fell back to normal levels. I mean, our content is state legislation. Even we have to admit that’s maybe not the sexiest stuff in the world. Happily, after the year started, and issues started to be in the news, traffic began to rebuild, soon surpassing our total visitors in November:
I added the pages/session to show that not only are more people coming, they are looking at more and more bills and legislators per visit. In fact, here’s the breakdown of content viewed since Jan 1, 2017. (The green slice labeled Account represents our paid subscriber traffic, and the light blue slice is traffic from those customer’s own websites.)
So there you have it! BillTrack50 is for reading bills. Indeed, since we’ve started we’ve had just about 1,000,000 visitors click on (and presumably read) a specific bill.
It is also interesting to look at where this traffic is coming from. Easy answer, the United States represents over 90% of our visitors.
But looking more locally:
Our top metro areas are, starting with the biggest:
- New York
- Washington DC
- Los Angeles
- San Francisco
- Chicago
- Denver
- Dallas
- Atlanta
- Boston
- Houston
BillTrack50 is based in Denver, and a lot of our first customers and users and fans were in Denver, so I think that’s why Denver ranks so high on the list. None the less, it is nice to see people from every single metro area, all across the country, are reading up on what is going on in their state government. (If this post has inspired you to get a little more involved, great! Here’s some advice for getting started.)
Power to the People!
About BillTrack50 – BillTrack50 is a user friendly free service that provides legislation research in all 50 states and federally. BillTrack50 also offers legislation and regulation tracking across the nation with tools to help organization stay on top of changes (bill sheets and alerts) and share legislation they are tracking with key stakeholders (legislator scorecards, widgets and stakeholder pages). If you are interested in learning more about how BillTrack50 saves organizations time and money, sign up for a demo and try it out BillTrack50 Pro for a month, for free.