For the past couple of weeks, my Tuesday nights between 8pm and about 10pm have been spent monitoring the impact of television. This is not a round-about way of saying I've just been sat there watching the telebox – oh, no; this is work! (Ish)

The very talented Lauren is currently doing rather well on BBC2's The Great British Sewing Bee and, having built the website for her haberdashery Guthrie & Ghani (have a look at the case study), we decided to monitor visits in real-time as we anticipated a traffic spike while the show was on-air. And we were right … sort of.

The site was viewed on a range of different devices and, right, spot the episode spikes within 'hourly views'. Zoiks!

FUN FACTS:

• There was a massive spike in visits on the day the first episode aired – although the following day actually saw an increase in daily visits to the website.
• Even discounting the on-air spikes, average daily traffic to the site has increased by a whopping 1000% since the first episode.
• Episode 2 encouraged 13% more visits than episode 1. (The second episode also got slightly higher ratings – 2.57m compared with last week's 2.56m.)
• During the show, there were spikes in activity on the website just after Lauren appeared on-screen, and just after she tweeted – particularly if the tweet included a link to the site (unsurprisingly).
• There was a noticeable increase in activity on Guthrie & Ghani during the programme's 'history of sewing' item … which, ummm, may perchance suggest that some folks aren't hugely enamoured with this part of the show?!

So our hypothesis was correct, that a prime-time TV show would impact the website while on-air – but what we hadn't anticipated was that the number of concurrent users would actually reach its peak about 10 minutes after the end of each programme. I guess it's not that surprising – as people rush to their computers once the show's finished to find out more – but not something that had occurred to us before it happened.

Same again next week – Lauren, pictured above with those troublesome trousers, is still in the running for the title Britain's Best Amateur Sewer (shame about that homonym). Be sure to watch the next installment of The Great British Sewing Bee, BBC2, Tuesday, 8pm to see how she gets on.

And while you do that, remember I'll be sat on a sofa with the TV on but actually watching my laptop, tabbing repeatedly between umpteen browser windows monitoring real-time stats, following who's tweeting what … and no doubt subconsciously learning a bit about sewing at the same time. That is the power of televsion.