One of my favorite parts of Google Analytics is the Intelligence Events. This tool noticed more than the usual number of anomalies on October 16th.
Initially, I couldn’t figure out what was causing this traffic. Yale had recently had some big national news: two Nobel prizes, and the inauguration of a new president. But, neither event had happened on the 16th. I checked calendar events and other news stories, but nothing came up.
After looking at other reports, I discovered that most of the spike could be explained by an increase in traffic to the Sterling Memorial Library building page. Now I knew what, but I still didn’t know why.
Finally, I remembered that the Sterling Memorial Library nave had recently been featured as the background image on the main landing page of bing.com. I checked, and sure enough, that had happened on the 16th.
Mystery solved.