November numbers trend upward

Traffic at theorion.com recovered nicely last month, with page views topping 48,600 and pages per session climbing to 2.62. Those numbers are even better than they seem because, as the chart above shows, website visits fall dramatically when Chico State is on a break. That means traffic was down a full week and the monthly traffic still improved from the month before.

Three stories accounted for 12.5 percent of the November traffic:
• The death of freshman Jack Callaway
• A sports column about racism in NFL team names
• An opinion piece about exploding Samsung 7s

The other top stories were:
• A sports column advocating pay for college athletes
• A news story about undocumented students being urged to return to the U.S.

The Thanksgiving-break traffic dip isn't surprising. A look at analytics for the past 12 months shows how important school being in session is to paper.

The middle of summer is by far the slowest time for the website.

One other interesting thing about the chart is the slump in October. It's worth a closer look at the numbers to see what was behind it.

Carly Plemons named EIC for Spring 2017

Carly Plemons

Carly Plemons, a junior from Temecula, California, will be The Orion's editor-in-chief next semester.

Carly has worked as a reporter on the paper's breaking news team, a writer for the arts and entertainment section and this semester was the arts and entertainment section editor. She helped develop an Orion radio show this fall on KCSC campus radio.

We had three excellent applicants for the paper's top editorial position. In her interview, Carly emphasized strengthening all the paper's platforms and proposed some exciting changes for theorion.com.

Congratulations, Carly!

October numbers are bad news

October analytics for theorion.com showed nothing but red ink for site traffic. Sessions, pageviews and time on site were all down compared to September. While traffic was still above average, remember that average includes the summer months when the site attracts very few visitors.

Chart from Quill Engage

The Quill Engage report the paper gets each week and month included some numbers that might help sort out the problem:
• Mobile, tablet and desktop sessions were all down from the month prior. Desktop sessions represented the most traffic; mobile visits had the most in September.
• New-user numbers were up, but the newcomers tended to spend less time on the site. That means people who came to the website to read a particular story didn't stick around to read more. One way to keep them longer is to add hyperlinks to stories that send readers to related content on the site.
• At the same time, referrals were down. Redoubling the social-media effort would help turn that around.
• About 55 percent of site traffic came from search engines, about the same level as September. That number could get bigger with more attention to writing headlines that contain keywords.
• While page views were down, people who came to the site actually read more pages than the month before. That may sound like it contradicts the previous point, but I think October represented a return to last year when a large group of regular readers were using theorion.com like a traditional newspaper, navigating to the home page and looking for stories to read. Promoting the website could help grow that core group and improve traffic overall.

My own opinion, based on four years of looking at numbers like these, is that the lack of strong breaking and enterprise news stories is behind the slump. Traditionally, those sorts of stories have been the big driver of traffic to theorion.com, but few of those stories appeared on the website in October and fewer were among the top 10 stories viewed. I do think, though, that livening up the sports and arts and entertainment efforts to take advantage of the web -- more video, more nontraditional storytelling, as we discussed in section critiques the past several weeks -- would also help.

This would be a good discussion for the next ed board meeting.

End-of-October Surprise

After a couple of weeks of poor numbers, traffic on theorion.com rebounded last week to end October on a high note. Traffic on all devices was up the past seven days, with mobile taking the lead.

The bump started Wednesday and continued for a couple of days, I suspect because visitors were looking for news about Halloween in Chico. A review of "The Girl on the Train" by Anisha Brady provided the most traffic of the week (and of the month!) with about 1,200 views by this morning. Because that story's bounce rate (the percentage of visitors who come to the website to view just that story) was about 95 percent, it's likely the traffic came from Google search or a link to the review posted on another website.

Page views for the month were 38,594, down from 52,040 in September.

The number of visits to theorion.com jumped this past week.

Here are the top stories from last Tuesday through Monday:
The Girl on the Train a Thrilling Ride - 1,181
Letter to the Editor - 374
Virginity an Important Milestone - 311
Art Tour Reveals Hidden Gems of School - 171
Full Disclosure: Athletes Getting Paid - 139
Live Halloween Coverage - 139
Candidates Running for Chico City Council - 134
Chico State Ranked Among Best Schools in California - 127
Race Relations are Moving Backward - 122

Web traffic in the doldrums

The Orion website had 8,706 page views
last week. The column show views per story

Traffic at theorion.com has settled into a trough the past few weeks after some encouraging spikes last month. A look at the most popular stories from last week gives a clue about the cause.

Hard news, and especially breaking news, has always been the biggest driver of readers to The Orion website. These numbers appear to show less interest in news content, but I think a more accurate reading is that the paper is not reporting newsworthy stories.

The other apparent trend in these analytics is that the opinion section has become more popular. A look at the historical trends, though, shows opinion traffic is about the same as it's always been except for the big jump last month when the column about abolishing Greek life captured lots of views.

I thought a look at web traffic since last year would be interesting, too, so I captured this snapshot of theorion.com page views since last December, the best data available through Google Analytics. It shows overall better daily traffic last spring, the predictable dip in the summertime (which shows students are the sites core readership) and a few spikes this fall. Overall, though, readership is down. This would be a good topic for this week's ed board and section meetings.

Some ideas for designing square-tab pages from AARP

When newspaper publishers decided to save money by reducing page widths on broadsheet pages and page heights on tabloid pages, they created some awful canvases for page designers. When The Orion switched to a square tab last year, it took some time for the paper's design staff to recognize they needed to treat the full page the way they had treated each individual story when they were designing a broadsheet. In most cases, though, they were still seeing a single page rather than a spread, at least from a design standpoint.

So, I've been looking around for examples of successful designs in this 11-inch by 11-inch square. I like what the AARP Bulletin has been doing with its paper because Design Director Todd Albertson and his team have figured out how to minimize the shortcoming of the square.

Some examples from this month's issue:

This single page is pretty typical for the Bulletin. Notice the page label at the top separated by lots of white space from a simple bold, all-caps headline and a dek. A sidebar gets extra graphic treatment 

Longer pieces get a facing-pages treatment with a large headline in the top left corner of the left page and an explanatory dek. Notice the use of subheds to break up type and an infographic that ads editorial color on the right page. No jump lines necessary with this layout, by the way.

Standing features in magazines are called departments. The Bulletin identifies them for readers with a heavy blue horizontal line. Notice how the art elements are used on this page and the pages above. Again on this page, the headline is position in the top left corner with plenty of air surrounding it and not stretched across the top of the page, which is the default for The Orion page design. I think this approach helps the page look less cramped and squat. 

Another two-page spread, this one with art at the bottom of the first page and at the top of the second page. Notice, too, the use of the sidebar on the right page. There's a lot of text here, but it doesn't seem overwhelming because of the placement of the art and the dominance of the left-page photo. Notice, too, that all these stories have headlines and deks -- headlines to draw the reader into the story, deks to provide additional information about the story to help readers decide if they want to read further.

Greek column, letter boost September traffic

Orion statistics from quillengage.com

The number of visits to theorion.com crept back to more typical monthly levels in September with a big boost from Whitney Urmann's column advocating the abolition of the Greek system and a letter to the editor written in response to it.

The column generated 40 onsite comments,  6,725 page views (almost 13 percent of total website views for the month) and a letter from a sorority member that had 726 (now 744) page views.

The other top stories for traffic were:
2. Two Chico State students arrested by police, video goes viral - 1,587 page views
3. Chico State students warned of possible gunman - 1.356
4. The Greek letter to the editor - 726
5. Viral arrest video students will face trial - 635

Most visitors to the website in September arrived via smartphone. Quillengage wrote:

Sessions from mobile, desktop, and tablet users were all up this month. In keeping with the month prior, mobile continued to produce more traffic than any other device. With a 78% increase in your site's mobile sessions, mobile traffic reached 15,663 sessions. Your site had 11,140 sessions (up 57% from last month) from desktop users. Tablet traffic was up 52% with 1,221 sessions this month.

Those smartphone numbers are in addition to visitors who viewed The Orion via the paper's mobile app. Here's the report for September from Goodbarber, which provides the hosting (click the graphic for a larger view):