Carroll series increases Monitor's Web traffic

Courtesy of Romenesko:

Reporter Jill Carroll's 11-part series on her kidnapping ordeal has meant increased traffic on the web site of The Christian Science Monitor.

According to a press release issued today by the Monitor and by WebSideStory, Inc., a "provider of digital marketing and analytics solutions" which recently partnered with the paper, "when the series went fully live this past Monday, August 14th, more than 450,000 unique visitors flooded the site during the next 24 hours, making it one of the top-ranked newspaper web sites in the country for that period." The statement adds that after passing the one million mark for page views on Monday, that number increased to more than 1.5 million on Tuesday.

The series has also driven new visitors to the paper's Web site, with the number rising "to
more than seven times its daily average in July." The interactive features of the series, including video interviews, feeds and podcasts has also proven successful, increasing "the percentage of visitors viewing two or more pages from an average of 22 percent in July to more than 63 percent during the first two days of this week."