Great Western Coffee Shop

Interesting to note that our traffic increased noticably yesterday (6th October 2014) during disruption / signalling problems between Paddington and Reading - up to 107 sessions in a peak hour, versus a peak of 64 sessions in the busiest hour the previous Monday.   Total sessions for the day - 1369 comprising 831 different users (954 and 666 the week before).  127 posts during the day, compared to 71 the week before. At yesterday's posting rate, we would have over 3900 new messages in a month, but we're actually running at less than a half of that.

Attached picture shows Google Analytic session traffic by the hour for the last 14 days.

Sadly I expect a similar thing to happen today as members like myself look for comment on the delays which are ongoing between London and Reading as a result of a "person hit by train" at Hayes and Harlington. Before I looked at the Service Bulletin I had assumed it was related to yesterdays problems.

As always my thoughts are those who are affected by this latest incident and apologize Graham if this an inappropriate reply to your post.

I was wondering if it is possible for you to tell whether these are new visitors or not.

Is the increased traffic those of us who read here already checking that much more for updates and/or is there new traffic from people looking for the cause of the trouble and picking up the relevant threads in searches?

Not easy ... and it probably depends on what you mean by "new".   I would guess that the extra traffic's going to be a mixture of
* brand new guests who have never been to the site before
* guests who come only rarely (and if someone last visited in 2010, how "new" is (s)he this time)
* members who only come occasionally, and perhaps often visit as guests anyway
* frequently visiting members
Very hard to look way, way back for people who have been before - they may be using a different device on a different connection ... and even if they're cookie'd somewhere, cookies get deleted and timed out and we don't do them very long term anyway.


I would suspect that there is not a lot from new searches ... we're not indexed (to my knowledge) as a "news" site so that content gets offered within a few minutes - rather it takes time for it to make the indexes.   Further more, we really don't have a sales and marketing / promotional pitch for what we've got here.   There are questions that follow from that thought like "what is the forum for" and "how does the forum interact / relate to our train operator"; it has certainly changed over the years ...

We have just come to the end of a week of unprecedented problems on the London to Reading section, used by a very high proportion of FGW passengers.   On three days there were signalling problems that brought major changes to the services run (in a downward direction) at short/no notice, and on the morning of a fourth day, a person under train brought peak chaos again. Only on one day did a service close to the timetable run for the full time from midnight to midnight.  By contrast, the previous week ran more or less to schedule; a few odd problems for sure, but then you'll get those on a railway, especially one where capacity-limited clapped-out infrastructure is being renewed and expanded to help it cope with something closer to current and projected traffic levels.

(I added the above in case social media historians come back to this post in the future)

What difference have the problems experienced by FGW, and this its passengers, had on our traffic here?

Figures from Google Analytics:
5 days, 29 Sept - 3 Oct ... 4774 sessions from 2337 users
5 days, 6 Oct - 10 Oct ... 6036 sessions (+ 26.4%) from 2635 users (+ 12.7%)

Figures from forum statistics:
5 days, 29 Sept - 3 Oct ... 281 new posts
5 days, 6 Oct - 10 Oct ... 457 new posts (+ 62.6%)