Sunday, April 10, 2016

Strike news, opinion boost traffic

Last week's traffic on theorion.com peaked Tuesday, two  days before the CFA strike was canceled. Click on the chart to see a larger version.
In what was not a surprise, lots of people found their way to theorion.com last week for news and views about the threatened California Faculty Association strike, which was called off Thursday after negotiators came to a tentative agreement.

What was a surprise was the most popular story of the week: an opinion piece posted Monday by Jeff Guzman that attracted almost 5,000 views in the days before Thursday's contract-settlement announcement. Here's what the analytics looked like for that story:


Notice that 92 percent of the readers came to the website to read that particular story and 91 percent left after reading it (and most really read it; the average time spent on the page was more than six minutes).

I don't have the source of the traffic, but based on those numbers I'm guessing a link was posted on other websites to the editorial and social-media posts caught the eye of people interested in learning more about the causes of the potential walkout by 26,000 teachers.

The Orion staff did an excellent job of tweeting about the settlement as news broke Thursday, and 1,930 people had read the web version of the story by Sunday morning. Here are the numbers:


About 93 percent of those visitors came to theorion.com to read the story, and about 10 percent of visitors stuck around to read more website content. 

The 20,000+ page views for the week shows again that people will come to theorion.com when news breaks. The average traffic for March was 13,400 page views a week.

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