Saturday, April 2, 2011

A Big Day for the Pulse of Vegas Blog

The blog I write for Caesars Entertainment had a big April Fools' Day today. I worked for weeks lining up posts that would go live throughout the day (every hour on the hour).

At one minute after midnight, I posted the first item, a piece about Las Vegas changing its sign to include a word now made famous by Charlie Sheen: "Winning."

Here's the post.



Yeah, I've kind of done this before.

Two minutes after I posted it, I posted it on Facebook and Twitter. I used Charlie Sheen's handle (@CharlieSheen) in the post, and he (or his people) retweeted it. Well, things went a little nutty from there.

Many thousands of people clicked through to the blog. There were 3.1 million raw hits and 43GB of data downloaded (that's a lot). Visitors viewed an average of 2.95 pages during their visit, and the bounce rate (people who don't find anything they like and click off to another site without looking at a second page) is just %2.88 (the average for the Web is 50%).

The link I created for Twitter was clicked 90,000 times.

Let me help you visualize what this kind of traffic means for a blog like the Pulse of Vegas blog.



Yeah, a bit of a spike. Big day for the blog.