Traffic improves in March, still down from a year ago

Good stories and lots of them from the news section helped theorion.com post solid traffic gains in March despite the expected fall-off during spring break. Still, the website numbers are running behind Google analytics from a year ago. 

Here's a traffic comparison. Sessions are the number of visits. Users are the number of visits from a single IP address. Bounce rate is the percentage of visitors who read one page and leave.

Seven of the top 10 stories were news reports, and an eighth story -- a feature -- was written by Kelsi Sibert from the enterprise news team.

A better social-media effort probably contributed to the monthly increase. In March, 4,315 people arrived on an orion.com story after clicking on a social-media link, 757 more than the month before.

Compared to a year ago, though, the amount of traffic generated by social media posts is poor. In March 2017, just over 40 percent of sessions started with a Facebook or Twitter post (13,960). Last month, not quite 16 percent of visits (4,315) arrived via social media.

Because campus news is the primary reason people navigate to the website, what's being covered also affects traffic. The top stories for each of the months compared above looked like this:
March 2017 - RA's fired over alcohol allegations -- about 23,000 pageviews
March 2018 - Student falls to his death at Butte Hall, candlelight vigil -- 4,153 views
February 2018 - Rugby success story and a "Resident Evil" game review - 1,073 views

Here are the top 10 stories for March in terms of traffic:
1. One dead after falling from Butte Hall stairwell - 2,700 pageviews
2. Candlelight vigil held for death of student - 1,453
3. Student dies unexpectedly - 961
4. Head-on collision involving CalFire vehicle leaves on dead - 911
5. Longtime Chico High School teacher pleads guilty to molesting charges - 751
6. Cesar Chavez Day versus Chico State party culture - 714
7. Honor society email scam preys on the weak - 646
8. Two-week-long carnival kicks off at Chico Mall - 498
9. Local students organize walkout protest - 436
10. Chico State professor researches zebra fish in hopes of creating artificial blood - 419

 It will be interesting to see if The Orion's updated homepage design increases the number of people who click through to read more stories. The bounce rate for last month was 56 percent, quite a bit higher than recent months.