Grammy Awards — Website Performance Analysis
Used Python to analyze web traffic data across the Grammy Awards and Recording Academy sites before and after a 2022 domain split, measuring whether separating the two audiences actually improved engagement.
The Task
In 2022, The Recording Academy split its digital presence into two separate domains: grammy.com for the awards show and recordingacademy.com for the organization itself. The goal was to serve two distinct audiences more effectively. The question I was asked to answer was whether the split actually worked.
I analyzed daily web traffic data across both sites using Python, evaluating three core engagement metrics — bounce rate, pages per session, and average session duration — before and after the split. A competitive comparison against the American Music Awards site was included to benchmark Grammy performance in the market.
The Approach
The dataset covered daily traffic from both sites spanning multiple years, with flags for awards weeks and ceremony nights. The first step was splitting the Grammy data at the February 1, 2022 cutoff to isolate the combined-site era from the post-split era. From there I calculated three derived metrics for each period and site.
Pages per session, showing how much content users explored per visit:
# Calculate pages per session for all three dataframes frames = [combined_site, grammys, rec_academy] for frame in frames: frame['pages_per_session'] = frame['pageviews'] / frame['sessions']
Bounce rate as a function of total sessions, to avoid daily volatility skewing the result:
def bounce_rate(dataframe): sum_bounced = dataframe['bounced_sessions'].sum() sum_sessions = dataframe['sessions'].sum() return 100 * sum_bounced / sum_sessions
Key Findings
Traffic is almost entirely event-driven
The Grammy site averages 1,389,590 visitors on awards nights compared to 32,388 on regular days — a 43x difference. The site functions more like an event destination than an ongoing content platform.
The split improved engagement on both sites
Pages per session increased from roughly 1-2 on the combined site to ~2 pages on Grammys and ~2-3 pages on Recording Academy post-split. Users are exploring more content per visit on both separate sites.
Recording Academy retains users longer
Average session duration is 128.50 seconds on Recording Academy vs. 82.99 seconds on the Grammy site. The Grammy site drives high volume but shorter, more surface-level visits tied to the awards cycle.
The split created two distinct audiences
The Grammy site skews older, with higher representation in 55-64 (9.8%) and 65+ (6.4%) segments. Recording Academy skews younger, leading in 25-34 (26.2%) and 35-44 (19.5%). The split has effectively separated two audiences that were previously sharing one platform.
Metrics Comparison
Side by side, the three sites tell a clear story about what the split accomplished and where each site still has room to improve.
| Metric | Combined Site | Grammys (post-split) | Recording Academy |
|---|---|---|---|
| Bounce Rate | 41.58% | 40.16% | 33.67% |
| Pages per Session | ~1-2 | ~2 | ~2-3 |
| Avg Session Duration | 102.85s | 82.99s | 128.50s |
The Recommendation
Keep the sites separate. Strengthen the connection between them.
Re-merging would dilute the audience segmentation that is now driving higher engagement on both platforms. The Recording Academy site in particular shows what happens when content is targeted at the right audience: lower bounce rate, more pages per visit, and significantly longer sessions.
The Grammy site's core problem is not engagement quality during visits, it is the 43x traffic concentration around awards night that leaves the site largely inactive the rest of the year. The fix is cross-navigation: use the Grammy site as a high-traffic entry point and funnel interested users into the Recording Academy ecosystem through strategic linking and content callouts.
The main constraint is that the Grammy site's event-driven traffic spike is structural. No amount of content strategy fully offsets a 43x difference. The realistic goal is improving year-round retention, not eliminating the spike pattern.
What I Took Away
The most interesting moment in this project was realizing that the Grammy site's engagement metrics look weaker than the Recording Academy's not because the Grammy site is poorly built, but because of who visits it and why. Short sessions and lower pages per visit make complete sense for a site people check once a year to watch an awards show. The Recording Academy attracts people who actually care about the music industry year-round.
That distinction matters for how you interpret the data. A 43x traffic spike is not a failure to retain users, it is the nature of the product. The analysis is only useful if you understand what the numbers are actually measuring.