GOALLLLL!

In which we hit our target of weekly pageviews on history content.

This is what success looks (and tastes) like.

The Digital Engagement Department’s content team works on content across the IWM website, with a particular emphasis on producing original history articles.

Earlier this year, the team set itself the goal of reaching 60,000 weekly pageviews to history article content by the end of 2015 — that’s essentially double the amount of weekly traffic we usually see to those areas of the website. Attaining those numbers would be a challenge.

However, in mid-September, we hit that goal, achieving 60,426 pageviews during the week of 14 September.

After a quick round of applause, we sat down to examine the data. Looking at the dates initially, you’d think this was down to the Battle of Britain anniversary and the media attention around Battle of Britain Day on 15 September. But, while the anniversary certainly played a part in the increase in traffic, it’s not the whole story. Here’s the list of top 10 articles/subject hub pages viewed that week:

Right from the start you can see that Battle of Britain content wasn’t the only thing visitors were looking at that week — top of the list was an article about weapons in the First World War which had been picked up by Flipboard, a content aggregator. Based on this stat and the impact it had on our pageviews, we are now setting up a feed so users can subscribe to our history content via their aggregator app of choice. We’ll watch the stats on this to see if it helps grow our audience further.

Articles on women in WW1, wartime animals and Operation Market Garden also saw a boost that week, thanks to a mix of social media sharing and an increase in search traffic from Google.

We’re pretty pleased with the numbers, but you know what would make us even happier? 70,000.

Challenge accepted.