Part of its ongoing “Safety Net” series, this morning’s New York Times features Once Stigmatized, Food Stamps Find Acceptance, a story about the increasing demand for food stamps. In an earlier article, the NYT published one of its peerless national maps illustrating food stamp usage across the country. (“The number of food stamp recipients has climbed by about 10 million over the past two years, resulting in a program that now feeds 1 in 8 Americans and nearly 1 in 4 children.”)

This historic escalation is reflected in the web stats for the California Food Stamp Guide. A year ago, we drew attention to how the usage patterns at the FSG were a sign of the economic times. If so, then it has only gotten worse. Since then, as illustrated below, current Google Analytics for the FSG show monthly visitor sessions have increased to nearly 10,700 (a 52% increase), with over 101,000 page views (a 27% increase) and a bounce rate of only 0.25%. Annualized, this increase in the monthly usage rates of the FSG comes to more than 128,000 visitor sessions and 1,216,000 page views.

• Testing Search for Relevancy and Precision
• Internal Site Search Analysis: Simple, Effective, Life Altering! (by Avinash Kaushik of Occam’s Razor fame)
• Beyond Goals: Site Search Analytics from the Bottom Up (by Lou Rosenfeld, co-author with Peter Morville of Information Architecture for the World Wide Web)

It’s like this: Two months ago, in a different context, we observed that traffic at the California Food Stamp Guide seemed to have reached an annualized plateau of about 54,000 visitor sessions and 570,000 page views. Pretty much what we were expecting based on our experience with traffic at the earlier version it replaced.

That was then. This is now: Traffic at that site has escalated dramatically in the last two months, to 7.000+ visitor sessions with 79,000 page views, per month, which annualizes to 84,000+ visitor sessions and now approaching a million page views, at 948,000+ page views per year:

Translation: In the last two months, there has been a 55% jump in visitor sessions and 66% jump in page views. And the bounce rate now falls regularly below 1%, hovering around 0.65% most days. More people are finding it and sticking to the site.

What’s going on? During this more recent 30-day period, illustrated above, 86% of the visitor sessions were driven by 3,841 different keyword searches (the proverbial long tail). People have always been looking for help getting food stamps. But a whole lot more are now out there looking.