Thursday, February 26, 2015

Best cure for lagging traffic? Breaking news


Jenice Tupolo's story yesterday about the alleged theft of almost $10,000 from the campus finance club drew more than 7,500 page views in a single day, helping boost traffic on theorion.com to one of the best days ever.

The statistics for the day were:
• 8,590 unique visitors
• 52,032 page views(!)
• 467,536 hits

That compares to an average day for the month of 3,304 visits, 21,143 page views and 121,277 hits. Quite a day!

The story also blew up social media, attracting 346 Facebook likes and 21 retweets or favorites.



It also demonstrates the power of breaking news to drive traffic to The Orion's website. Month after month, the site analytics show that covering news on campus is the single best way to get readers to come to theorion.com. It helps that its audience already treats the paper more like a newspaper than a website, viewing on average almost 12 pages in every visit. (Even the best national news sites average fewer than four).

Website traffic also got a boost from the sexual assault commentary package put together by the opinion staff. Its landing page had more than 1,000 views and one of the stories, Joe Rogers' piece about men also being the victims of sexual assault, attracted 2,872 page views. He told me before the staff meeting yesterday that someone had asked him for permission to translate the column into Portugese!

All in all, it was a very good day for the newspaper. Congratulations everyone!


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