St Augustine isn’t just a 9:00-5:00 town

Businesses in St Augustine have long heard the remark that “they roll up the streets at 5:00” and many Historic City News readers have seen downtown retailers who do just that; but in 2015, there’s a whole world of business going on that you don’t see.

More and more business is being conducted well before the shopkeepers have had their morning coffee and long after they have turned in for the evening. The question is, are you getting your share of it — or any of it at all?

“The beauty of the Internet for businesses like ours is that you can really do a lot of data analysis that was not possible or accurate in the past,” Historic City News editor Michael Gold explained to our newest intern reporter. Just a casual review of traffic on our website demonstrates when St Johns County residents and consumers nearby are choosing to read their news.  We don’t have to guess, we know precisely.

The skill of interpreting that data in a way that makes it meaningful is what the science of data analysis is all about.  Database marketing to both consumers and commercial businesses is the norm — not the exception.  For years, large international companies like American Express used predictive models, based on consumer experience, to establish spending limits and make promotional offers to their cardholders based on buying habits learned from their individual past transactions.

“With the click of a couple of buttons on my smartphone, I can look at exactly how much traffic we have on any of our Internet properties — historiccity.com, our facebook page, or our Twitter feed,” Gold explained.  “We are using data elements, like that, to uncover when and where our audience originates in order to provide the most effective advertising buys for our customers and sponsors.”

For example, advertising that appears on our website between 8:00 a.m. and 11:00 a.m. on Monday is all but guaranteed to be seen by our readers.  Likewise we know that on any day of the week, we should plan to load our updates and do maintenance between 1:00 a.m. and 5:00 a.m. because there is consistently the least amount of other traffic to slow things down.

And, although the majority of our readers are still online during the old 9:00-5:00 timeframe, at least as far as reading the news is concerned, the data proves they are also active “active hours”, on Saturdays more than Sundays, and when many of them are returning to work on Monday, more than other days during the business week.

Historic City News also monitors the source of our Internet traffic; for example, we know that more than 75% of our readers are connected to the Internet from a location within 60 miles of St Augustine.  And, through the equivalent of “call blocking” on a telephone, we block traffic to our website from locations outside the United States — so our traffic is usable local traffic and not some teenage hacker in Beijing.

Our readership has grown tremendously in the past five-year period, according to Gold who registered HistoricCity.com in April of 2000.  More and more news consumers are getting their news from us than ever before.  Gold says he looks for that trend to continue during our 15-Year Anniversary and for the foreseeable future.