District 17 Senate candidate Cheryl Kagan has released her website statistics for 2009. They show growing interest in her campaign.


The chart above shows Kagan's unique visitors by month starting in April, when her site was relaunched. A unique visitor is one IP address coming into the site with no re-entry for up to 30 minutes. So if a visitor comes in twice during a half-hour, that counts as one visit. But if a visitor comes in once at noon and again at 12:31, that counts as two visits. This is a fairly standard convention for site visit statistics.

Kagan cleared 2,000 unique visitors in three of the last four months in 2009. Her peak month was December, in which she recorded 2,289 unique visitors. That's noteworthy because December is normally a weak month for political websites. Her monthly counts are now in the same ballpark as some of the state's small- or mid-sized political blogs, such as Monoblogue, Maryland on My Mind or PG Politics. If Kagan's site was a political blog, it could very well crack the state's top ten list. Kagan's total unique visit count for 2009 was 13,949.

This is impressive performance considering that the Democratic primary is nine months out, and it's no accident. Kagan drives traffic to her website through constant door-knocking, early literature and repeated promotion from her Facebook page. Once on the site, visitors stay for a mean time of nearly five minutes and look at an average of 1.8 pages. Kagan updates her blog regularly, ensuring new material is usually available for repeat visitors.

Incumbent Senator Jennie Forehand has a campaign website too. We hope that she will also release her visit statistics for the benefit of MPW readers.

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