Eye on The Orion: Spring semester website traffic doubles

Academic year 2016-2017 traffic for theorion.com

Fueled by a strong effort on the news side and controversy in the opinion section, theorion.com completed the spring semester with more than double the traffic of the website's two previous semesters. This strong showing brought overall traffic to some very impressive numbers for the year:
Pageviews: 678,035
Unique users: 186,315
Bounce rate: 36 percent

Because The Orion didn't start gathering data from Google Analytics until December 2015, it's impossible to make a comparison to last year, but the numbers for Spring 2017 make theorion.com look like an entirely different website from the two previous semesters. Traffic this spring accounted for more than two-thirds of traffic to the site for the academic year.

Traffic for Spring Semester 2017

The spring-to-spring comparison shows a dramatic increase in pageviews, sessions and unique visitors.

Traffic for Spring Semester 2016

The numbers for Spring 2016 and Fall 2017 are similar, with last spring showing better traffic numbers overall, but a poorer bounce rate (80.41 percent versus 65.43 percent), which means more people stayed on the website to read more stories this fall. The bounce rate this past semester, though, was an amazing 18.11 percent. (Bounce rate is "the percentage of visitors to a particular website who navigate away from the site after viewing only one page.")

Traffic for Fall Semester 2016

With the dramatic increase in traffic on the website, it's counterintuitive that The Orion's mobile app was less popular with visitors than the year before. In every category, more people used the app to read more pages on the app last year. More people also downloaded the app last year.