November traffic takes a serious dip

Chart from Google Analytics

Pageviews on theorion.com were down significantly in November -- about a quarter of the traffic from the month before and half the pageviews of November 2016.

A dip from October is expected. Students and most faculty aren't on campus for a week. Still, compared to the same month a year before, these numbers are dismal.

As I mentioned last month, social media and especially Facebook are becoming more and more important as a way to attract readers to the website. In November, only 13 items were posted to The Orion's Facebook page. Here's what Google Analytics had to say about how that affected traffic:

That's means just 11.3 percent of site visitors got to the website from a Facebook post. Here's what the social media numbers looked like the same month a year ago. (Click to see a larger image.)

So, while visits (sessions) were down almost 30 percent, social media referrals were down 61 percent. Because the number of visitors who stick around and view more pages after they get to a page on theorion.com is traditionally pretty high, that spelled double trouble for pageviews.

Twitter isn't a big traffic driver for the website, but numbers there were down, too. Here's a scary chart from Twitter analytics. The down arrows show a comparison to the month before.

The silver lining in these numbers is that the number of Twitter followers is way up. So, the breaking news and sports teams' efforts to live tweet seem to be paying off, but failing to Tweet links to stories drove Twitter-supplied traffic way down. If reporters and editors start tweeting about stories when they're published, those numbers and overall visits will improve.

I don't want to ignore the overall picture, though. There are reasons sessions were down significantly besides the poor social media effort. Overall, the website took a big step back.

One reason I've pointed out in the past couple of weekly critiques is editors circumventing the automatic publishing function of Camayak so stories don't instantly appear on the website when they've been edited. Instead, editors focused on the print edition are putting them in the paper first and only later uploading them to the web (or not uploading them at all). With the majority of the target audience reading The Orion online, that's a losing strategy.

Another reasonable explanation is that content wasn't as compelling. It's important to understand that a lot of visitors still use theorion.com like a newspaper. They visit the home page and then section pages to browse headlines. That's usually reflected in an amazingly low bounce rate (the percentage of visitors who read a single story and leave). Visitors who don't see anything new (because there are old stories in the home page photo carousel, for example) or see headlines that interest them won't stick around to read more. October's bounce rate was 5.7 percent. November's was a painful 73 percent.

A list of the top 10 stories based on pageviews shows very few garnering strong traffic. An O-Face column about different sexual appetites was the most viewed post with 706 pageviews. Last month, 10 stories attracted more views. Three of the most-viewed stories for November weren't even published last month.

Here are this month's top stories in terms of traffic:
1. College students and sex interests - 706 pageviews
2. Two Chico State students arrested by police go viral (from Aug. 30, 2016) - 545 views
3. Naughty gifts for people on your nice list (O-Face) - 541
4. First-year Chico State student died - 269
5. Chico police identify victim of Cherry Street homicide - 268
6. Mass Effect Andromeda defines wasted potential - 244
7. Crime map reports Chicoween incidents - 240
8. College athletes struggle with finances (Nov. 12, 2013) - 226
9. Shooting at Halloween party near Chico State - 226
10. Guide to gay men's body types (Feb. 7, 2015) - 204

One positive for the month was the number of Orion app downloads. Here are the November numbers from app host GoodBarber.