January traffic shows importance of social media

Traffic for thorion.com January 2017 and January 2018 (click to see a larger image)

The beginning of a semester is typically a slow time for traffic at theorion.com, so the low numbers for the past two weeks aren't a surprise. A close look at the Google analytics does provide an insight into how important social media is to a the website.

I set up a traffic comparison between January 2017 and last January 2018. That's the graph at the top of this post.

Why the difference? Well, the flow of news is different from day to day and week to week, but my impression is that this semester started out really well on the news side. I thought that would show up in the traffic numbers. Also, news reporters and editors had tweeted up a storm as they covered a women's march and two political events, so I expected a bigger audience.

What I found when I dug deeper into the analytics was the opposite. And while there are other factors at work, I think I also found the reason for the slower traffic.

Social media acquisition comparison, January 2017-January 2018 (click to see a larger image)

Traffic driven by the tweets was responsible for driving more readers to theorion.com last month (a 158 percent increase), but a poor effort on Facebook more than matched it and was responsible for 76 percent decline in Facebook referrals -- that's more than 1,100 fewer visitors! Referrals from Google search and visits from people who typed in "theorion.com," were about the same in the two months, so this turned out to be an almost perfect experiment in the importance of social media.

Mobile app downloads and traffic for January 2018 (click to see a larger image)

The numbers for The Orion's mobile app were comparable. One bit of good news: Downloads made a big jump during the first week of classes. I'm going to guess that's because staff members at the first critique of the semester added the app to their smartphones.

Here are the most-read stories from the first two weeks of the semester. Note that eight of the 10 were written by reporters or editors from the two news sections.

1. Chico State sisters die in fatal car crash - 445 pageviews
2. Gas tax proposal endorsed by local representatives fuels unrest in Chico - 408
3. Commercial cannabis legal in California yet still banned in Chico - 211
4. Memorial planned for Frace sisters - 207
5. Michael Bethea: a journey - 201
6. LaMalfa speaks against gas tax, attacks protesters - 157
7. Congressional candidates speak out at town hall - 145
8. Domestic dispute leads to lockdown of two local schools - 121
9. Wildcat of the Week - Claire Wayne - 119
10. New director of Gateway Science Museum - 118

Here are the basic traffic numbers for Jan. 21-Feb. 1.

From Google Analytics. Click to see a larger image