New tool for measuring site traffic

I followed a link to a tech podcast last week and heard a description of something called Quill Engage, an analytics tool that takes website data from Google and presents a narrative report. It's great for sorting out what's important from the Google analytics report and comes (free) in monthly and weekly versions.

Here's what theorion.com report looked like for March. It's essentially the same information I shared on this blog a few weeks ago but also includes some things I didn't see. 

I'll be using this tool on the blog in coming weeks.

Jenice Tupolo named EIC for Fall 2016

Jenice Tupolo, a senior journalism and PR major from Davis, will be next fall's Orion editor-in-chief.

Jenice Tupolo

Jenice is in her third semester at the paper and has worked as a staff writer, breaking news section editor and content managing editor.

She also has been writing the Chico Enterprise-Record's "Starving Student" column this spring and will be an intern at The Sacramento Bee this summer.

Jenice will be interviewing candidates for editorial board positions in the next week or so.

Congratulations, Jenice!

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.

A slow March with a bump at the end

History repeated itself in March, with the predictable slowdown over spring break reducing overall monthly traffic numbers for theorion.com about 18.5 percent from February. A movie review and a little breaking news late in the month, though, helped the totals.

Here are the numbers for March:
Pageviews - 53,643
Unique users - 24.790
Pages per visit - 1.75

Numbers for The Orion app were down, too. Pageviews were 8,772 compared to 9,008 in February. Downloads kept climbing, though: 1,318 put the app on their smartphones in March, up 72 from the month before.

It's clear both platforms got a traffic bump in the final week of March. Here's what happened, according to Google analytics:

Carly Plemons' review of "10 Cloverfield Lane," a movie that critics loved but Carly not so much, was the best-viewed story of the month with 6.652 views. It wasn't posted until March 26, so it was responsible for most of the end-of-month gains. The biggest chunk of its readers (87 percent) came to theorion.com via a Google search.

Traffic for two stories about Chico State's new president, Gayle Hutchinson, were also posted that week, as were stories about the potential faculty strike: one about a fact-finders report (383 views) and one about students marching in support of faculty (325 views). Both were posted on March 28.

Here are the five most-viewed stories on the website for March:
1. Second half of "10 Cloverfield Lane" disappoints - 6,652 page views
2. Lake Oroville water level rises to the occasion - 2,499
3. First openly gay CSU president "a step in the right direction" -  717
4. Students dissatisfied with health center - 646
5. Stop hating on greatness (sports column about Steph Curry) - 579

Does Spring Break really matter?

The Orion doesn't publish a physical newspaper during spring break, but do visitors keep using the website?

Google analytics for the week of March 13-20 show they do, but traffic slowed down about 43 percent for the week. Pages per visit were down, too, from 1.77 to 1.65. That could mean that people who came to the site and found few new stories didn't stick around to explore.

Something else interesting happened, though. Visitors to theorion.com still mostly navigate to the site to see what's there, rather than arrive after seeing some sort of social-media tease to stories. Last week, about 11.8 percent of visitors went directly to home page, while just over 11 percent entered at the story about water levels at Lake Oroville. That's new and probably worth watching to see if it's the start of a trend. 

Here are the week's top stories or pages:

Want a model for how to write a lede?

At critique a few weeks ago, we took a look at the ledes in the newspaper and tried rewriting some to make them more:
• accurate
• clear
• to the point
• compelling

So as I started reading the San Francisco Chronicle's story this morning about uneven punishment for sexual harassment at UC Berkeley ("Disparity in UC discipline"), I knew I had to post the first few paragraphs of Annette Asimov's story as a model. Hers is a well-reported but complicated, multi-sourced story that could have been tough to summarize and get into.

Here's the top:

UC Berkeley has a clear system in place for investigating employees accused of sexually harassing students or colleagues— but a gaping hole exists when it comes to disciplining the rule-breakers.

Punishment is often arbitrary.

The issue of capricious discipline has emerged as a big problem at the premier public university as cases have mounted.

Four highly paid employees whose violations of the University of California's sexual harassment policy came to light in the last year all received different punishments: an astronomy professor got a warning, the dean of the law school had his pay temporarily reduced and was told to apologize, a vice chancellor had to resign that position but was given another high-profile job two months later, and an assistant coach -- the lowest-paid and the only one without tenure -- was immediately fired.

Look at what Asimov does here:
• The basic story is summed up in the first paragraph: Policy is in Place - BUT - There's a Problem
• Second paragraph: PUNCH, four words, THE PROBLEM (the heart of the story).
• Next, a sentence to put the story in context.
• Then straight to the specifics, the evidence, that the university has not done what it says it does. And what a great twist at the end of this long paragraph to provide the "why" of the story: the powerful don't have to play by the same rules as everyone else.

Asimov has been writing and reporting for a long time, and she has won several awards. If you're looking for a reporter to emulate, she would be a great choice.

Steady (But Disappointing) Web Traffic Last Week

Traffic on theorion.com seems to have settled in to a predictable 60,000 page views a month, and last week's traffic mirrored that rate. That's disappointing. I would have expected a serious traffic bump on Wednesday when the CSU Board of Trustees announced the appointment of a new president for Chico State.

The website did get about 1,000 more visitors than the previous day, so the audience is showing up when news breaks. With a terrific effort on the part of the news teams to Tweet the announcement, post something quickly on Facebook and get a story up quickly and then follow with two more stories the same morning, I expected much more traffic for the announcement.

A few guesses about why:
• Both the CSU system office and Chico State's public information office had full press releases available almost the moment the decision was announced, and Chico State's was emailed to the campus.
• The Chico E-R had a good, complete story up soon after the announcement (though only minutes ahead of The Orion's story).
• The Orion didn't run its best piece of exclusive content: A recorded interview with the president-elect.
• Students, The Orion's primary audience, isn't that interested in who will be running the university.

The appointment wasn't even the most-viewed story of the week. Here are the top 5:
1. Lake Oroville rises to the occasion - 2,202 page views
2. Students caught in crossfire of CFA strike - 458
3. Board of Trustees announces new Chico State president - 411
4. Opinion: Big boobs, big problems - 303
5. Arts: Fuller House shouldn't get an fuller - 289