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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Check out the April monthly data on Site Analytics, Referral Analytics and Ranked Lists.

Highlights this month include a strong showing from MLB.com as the basetball season got under way and the draft bringing a spike to NFL.com during the off-season.

And as a reminder, Search Analytics data is updated daily!

We turned our attention this week to one of Massachusetts and Boston’s greatest traditions – Patriots’ Day and the Boston Marathon. While only a few states recognize Patriots’ Day as a holiday, the running of the marathon has unofficially renamed the day Marathon Monday in Massachusetts.

The Boston race gets a lot of hype every April, but it is only one of many on the annual major marathon circuit. I was curious to see how all the events fared in a search for the generic keyword ‘marathon.’

Among the many informational and running sites, two specific races sites fall in the top twelve. The Boston site does well to grab the top spot on the winner’s podium, but a strong showing is to be expected this time of year. Chicagomarathon.com’s twelvth place showing is almost more impressive considering the race is not until mid-October. Being a top destination for all searches for ‘marathon’ more than five months before race day is all the more noteworthy when you consider that the site for the New York City race (Nov. 1) comes in 24th on this list.

Just as the race takes dedicated preparation, with runners and fans traveling the world for these events, the contest to be the top ‘marathon’ search destination is not one that can be taken lightly.

U.S. markets may have risen by 15% in the last 3 weeks, but as anyone who works in an office knows, overall employee productivity in late March is pretty pathetic. The primary culprit: the NCAA tournament. Sure, many of our colleagues don’t even bother coming to work, fully accepting their addiction to heart-pounding hoops action, support of their alma maters, and the religious scrutiny of their brackets. Those who don’t stay home, however, are shamelessly plugged in at the office, scouring the web for real time scores, news, and game highlights.

With this year’s NCAA tourney wrapping up last night in Motown, what better time to look back at the past few weeks of March Madness and see which of the major online hoops properties managed to effectively attract and engage passionate fans, crazed bracketologists, and everyone in between. Throw a high unemployment rate into the mix, and the bracket traffic data really starts to sizzle. So which site came out ahead as king of the online court? I took a close look at NCAA bracket pages for ESPN, CBS Sports, and Yahoo! to find out.

Week 1 traffic to all three properties showed a strong year over year uptick, with ESPN taking the lead in 2009 from CBS, the 2008 leader. No shocker that overall week 1 traffic volumes eclipsed week 2 numbers: clearly a result of heated bracket building and heavy first round action in the tournament’s first week.

While ESPN reigned supreme in the 2009 battle for bracket builders, CBS proved that in the end, content is the real name of the game. Combining live streaming video coverage of games on site, exclusive highlights and commentary, weekly contests, and user generated content, the CBS bracket site averaged 7.8 pages per visit in Week 1 of the tournament, 20% stickier than ESPN at 6.5 pages per visit. Week 2 brought more of the same, with CBS closing the Unique Visitors gap and maintaining a clear engagement advantage.

Big month ahead: Major League Baseball kicks off, NBA postseason begins, and NHL playoffs get started. We’ll be sure to keep our eyes on the Fantasy ball, and keep you posted on the biggest stories out there in the online sporting world.

My brackets were busted and my teams were ousted more rounds ago than I’d like to admit, but the tournament has again been a success for CBS Sports. While other networks have a more balanced sports calendar throughout the year, the NCAA Basketbally Tournament is the annual event that stands above the rest for CBS.

The varied Fox coverage of the NFL, MLB, College Football BCS, and Nascar span nearly the entire calendar year, and provide a more regular flow of traffic to their sports site than CBS does. With bracket management, tournament fantasy options as well as live coverage of the games, CBS does leverage its online channel well during its few weeks in the spotlight though. This could serve as a lesson to other networks in how to best utilize their sports sites in coordination with their TV coverage, as well as a lesson to CBS that success in one marquee event is good, but it takes more than that to stay top of mind with viewers throughout the year.

Check back later this week for more on the NCAA Tournament.

Recently Ford Motor Company announced an online promotion in which contestants have a chance to win a new 2010 Fusion Hybrid along with a trip for two to NASCAR’s Championship weekend in Miami. Contestants register at a site developed by Ford called weraceyouwin.com. Ford is promoting the sweepstakes on social networking sites Facebook and Twitter.

Certainly this promotion plays off Ford’s heavy involvement in racing, but is the Fusion prospect that in tune with what’s going on in the world of NASCAR? And to what extent does leveraging Facebook and Twitter further the cause?

Assuming Ford is targeting mid-size car intenders, people who recently bought or shopped for a mid-size car, Compete was able to assess the extent to which this consumer segment visits nascar.com and the extent racing enthusiasts are on social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter. And if they are, will social networking sites reach them?

As the result of a collaboration with JD Power and Associates, Compete has been able to match our panel of online consumers and their behavior with vehicle purchase data from JD Power. One result of this collaboration is the Online Media Behavior Study which tracks the current online activity of recent new vehicle purchasers. With this tool we are able to isolate mid-size sedan purchasers to determine their propensity to visit nascar.com as well as other sites like Facebook and Twitter to see if the weraceyouwin.com promotion has the potential to effectively reach the right prospects.

At first glance, one could get the impression that this promotion might be better suited to another group of prospects than mid-size car purchasers. Using January 2009 data, indexing mid-size car purchasers’ propensity to visit nascar.com against the internet browser population, we find they are less likely to visit the racing site. However, December and January is the off-season for NASCAR, with no racing until the season opening Daytona 500 in early February.

Take a look at what happens when we use data from Summer 2008, the height of the NASCAR season. The mid-size car index jumps to 167 suggesting that just maybe mid-size car purchasers need to hear the roar of the engines and the smell of racing fuel to get their interest up. When they do, look out. They’re big fans.

In fact, interest in NASCAR increases as the season progresses for many new vehicle purchasers. Not surprisingly, Full-Size pickup purchasers are fans all year round but their interest really picks up in the summer. The same is true of domestic purchasers in particular while import purchasers don’t show as much interest - which is something Toyota should take a closer look at given their recent NASCAR involvement with Camry.

Mid-size car purchasers are also on Facebook, and not just during the summer but in the winter, too. That means a Ford/NASCAR promotion could effectively reach the right prospects with the sweepstakes message even before the NASCAR season revs up. Twitter doesn’t reach mid-size car purchasers as effectively as Facebook but that could be driven by the fact that most people Tweet via their mobile devices and don’t return to the site very often. As further proof of Facebook’s potential to reach this target, over half of NASCAR enthusiasts in general (those people who visit other sites with NASCAR sub-domains such as CNN and Fox Sports in addition to nascar.com) also visit the social networking site.

Understanding your prospect’s online behavior is critical to developing effective online campaigns. It can help you better target your best prospects and more efficiently reach them with the right messages. Compete and JD Power’s Online Media Behavior Study takes that a step further by identifying the online behavior of new vehicle purchasers. Understanding the behavior of purchasers can help auto marketers make the most out of the web by more efficiently using it to accurately target and reach new vehicle prospects.