April traffic was way up

Source: Google Analytics

Traffic on theorion.com continued to recover in April behind a strong news effort and visits generated by Google searches for Andre the Giant, Coachella and gay men's bodies.

The number of times someone navigated to the website was up 1,568 visits, and pageviews jumped a whopping 57 percent, from 57,854 in March to 90,824 in April.

The most encouraging number, though, was the improvement in bounce rate, the percentage of visitors who navigate away from the website after viewing one story. In March, that number was 56 percent. In April, it was down to 5.6 percent. I speculated last month that changing up the homepage design might help improve bounce rate, and this is evidence that's true.

Numbers are still down from a year ago. This chart compares this month to last month and April of last year.

When I dug deeper into Google analytics, I saw that the top 10 stories from April 2017 all had more than 2,000 pageviews. Last month, only half of the top 10 had even 1,000 page views.

Some of that loss of viewership can be attributed to poor social media performance. A year ago, more than a third of the visits to theorion.com came from a social-media referral, primarily Facebook. Here's the comparison:
April 2017 - 37.7%
April 2018 - 15%
March 2018 - 16%

Here are the top 10 most viewed stories for April:
Andre the Giant review - 1,845 pageviews
Coachella is not worth it ( a two-year-old column) - 1,394
Student dies unexpectedly - 1,357
Chico State's model U.N. team ranks among the best - 1,058
Honor society email scam preys on the weak (Fall 2017) - 1,029
Proposed fee increases could initially cost students up to $380 a year - 853
Guide to gay men's body types (a three-year-old column) - 789
AS election candidates argue their cases for office - 680
AS 2018 election results announced - 655
President Hutchinson announces voting results on proposed fee increases - 616