Another month has come and gone, leaving behind a trail of data and some interesting stories around springtime, sports, and social media. What changes did April bring? We dug into the numbers to look at fast moving sites, traffic trends, and some of the biggest stories of 2009 that we’ve been covering.

Everybody’s asking about it, so we’ll kick it off with Twitter, an ever-growing presence in the social arena. Aided by Ashton, Oprah, and significant media buzz, Unique Visitors to twitter.com increased to 19.4 Million in April, surpassing the New York Times for the first time. Oprah’s first tweet on April 17th delivered the highest Daily Reach ever to the site, with nearly 2% of all Americans online visiting Twitter.

Feeding off Twitter: Sure, Twitter is growing, but so are the many sites that rely on it. Fast movers in April included tweetmeme.com (up 338% to 1.68 Million Unique Visitors), tweetdeck.com (up 69% to 915,000 UVs), twittergadget.com (up 56% to 100,000 UVs), twitpic.com (up 37% to 3.33 Million UVs), and bit.ly (up 53% to 1.81 Million UVs).

Spring Fever: We know that spring is in the air when traffic flow to certain sites pick up. Pet lovers flocked to 1800petmeds.com in April (up 33% to 1.68 Million UVs), green thumbs and lawn caregivers went to scotts.com (up 46% to 710,000 UVs), and traffic to baseball sites were up sharply month over month. Mlb.com was up 62% to 12.25 Million Unique Visitors, and minorleaguebaseball.com also saw a nice bump (up 136% to 1.22 Million UVs). Red Sox Nation will be pleased to know that in addition to kicking off 2009 with 5 straight wins against the hated Yankees, the Sox also won the online traffic battle in April (367,000 UVs to redsox.com vs. 346,000 to yankees.com).

Micro-site Mania: Big upticks to some CPG and food retail micro-sites this month – who said these guys don’t spend online? Between content, contests, and coupons for consumers, some of these branders drove some serious traffic in April. The biggest food related movers included reynoldsrecycled.com (1.64 UVs) Taco Bell’s bajablast.com (up exponentially to 562,000 UVs), cicispizza.com (up 436% to 1.07 Million UVs), Hellmann’s buildtheperfectsandwich.com (up 417% to 441,000 UVs), and kfc.com (up 69% to 1.17 Million UVs).

The Easter Effect: Flower and gift sites saw a nice bump thanks to marketing around the Easter holiday. Ftd.com led the charge (up 282% to 2.73 Million UVs), with proflowers.com (up 59% to 750,000 UVs), and 1800flowers.com (up 26% to 774,000 UVs) also rising in the ranks. Godiva.com also showed a big lift (up 303% to 698,000 UVs).

We’ll keep an eye on all of these stories going forward to see what changes May will bring. In the meantime, find out how a new month of traffic has impacted site traffic, Search, and the overall internet landscape in your industry with all of Compete’s powerful tools on compete.com.

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