Friday, May 8, 2015

What This Week's Numbers Tell Us

The analytics provided by BlueHost, the web-hosting service for theorion.com, for the first week of May tell an interesting tale if you know how to read the numbers.

Traffic overall has settling in to a pattern that's been true most of spring semester. Here's what it looks like:



Extrapolating, that would put page views for May at about 471,700, a little slower than the first four months of this year.

What visitors are looking at helps explain why.

The top three stories for traffic so far this month are:
Study Break: Tom DeLonge "To The Stars" album review - 2,937 page views
Senior Spotlight: Entrepreneur creates app to to transform how people donate - 1,816 views
Chico state faculty, staff hit the ground running - 1,172 views

Not a news story in the bunch.

But it's not as if people aren't looking for news. Right up there with the top stories are visits to the News section page on the website: 1,233 views. That tells me people continue to come to theorion.com looking for news (rather than primarily being sent there through social media, which is the case for most news sites), they're just not finding what they're looking for.

And that, friends, needs to get fixed, or they won't keep coming back.

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