Midterm grade: A

Weekly pageviews (green line) and sessions for theorion.com since the end of January (source: Quill Engage)

With the help of some strong reporting from both the enterprise and breaking news staffs, traffic for theorion.com this semester has been nothing short of outstanding. Here are some numbers, courtesy of Google Analytics, for the website at midterm:

Pageviews - 176,992
Unique visits - 89,401
Home page visits - 26,479

The top stories, in terms of traffic, from Jan. 23-March 19:
1. Resident advisers fired for partying - 23,487 pageviews
2. Rape reported at frat house - 10,553
3. Chico State to pay former VP to work elsewhere - 5,325

A year ago, the analytics looked like this for the first half of the semester:

Pageviews - 112,084
Unique visits - 93,588
Home page visits - 13,820
Top story: 7,388 pageviews

For February 2017, traffic looked like this (click on the graphic for a larger version):

And the week before spring break this year:

Pageviews - 42,993
Unique visitors - 21,105
Home page visits - 4,482

More than 50 percent of the pageviews for the week were for the RA-firing story, illustrating once again that the campus and the community consider theorion.com to be the go-to source for news about Chico State. If you want to keep these great traffic numbers, continue to do a great job covering the news.

Nice work!

Spring Semester off to a record start

Two Orion news reports -- one an investigative piece about a retirement deal for a former Chico State vice president, the other breaking news about a sexual assault at a frat house -- pushed website readership for the first few weeks of spring semester to record levels.

Since classes resumed the third week in January, 17,475 visitors accessed 64,755 pages on theorion.com. That's fewer visitors than the same weeks last year (22,001) but half again as many pages (46,288). Page views this week were the most recorded for a single week since The Orion started measuring traffic with Google analytics.

Leading the way were the two stories:
Chico State to pay former employee to work elsewhere - 5,068 page views since Jan. 23
Rape reported at Kappa Sigma fraternity - 7,409
And the followup to the rape story - 1,535

Significantly, visitors this year looked at an average of almost two more stories while they were on the site (2.91), knocking down the bounce rate (visitors who leave the site after a looking at a single page) to an excellent 35 percent. Last year it was 83 percent!

That says to me that covering news well increases interest in the rest of the website and will help theorion.com grow its audience.

Click on the chart to see a larger version.

Spring 2017 Orion staff photo

Click to see a larger version. (photo by Miguel Orozco)

January traffic by the numbers

The analytics for theorion.com for January show about what you'd expect: Traffic was minimal while school was in session and then jumped when spring semester started. One nice surprise: Gabriel Sandoval's investigative story about the generous retirement package for a former Chico State VP attracted lots of readers. Even more people saw the story Feb. 1, but those numbers aren't included in these charts.

The top 10 stories for the month

Creating mobile video during Oriontation

One of the activities in Wednesday's Oriontation training session was learning to plan, shoot and edit videos with smartphones. Staffers produced short video packages about the exercise in about 30 minutes. Here are a couple of them.



Oriontation from Mark Plenke on Vimeo.

To view the video: https://splice.gopro.com/v?id=7Jyapm

December traffic takes predictable dip

The number of visits and pageviews for theorion.com were down in December, but that's no surprise. Traffic to the website always dips when students go on any kind of break. Page views were down 5 percent from November at 45,011.

One nice surprise was an improvement in "stickiness," the number of pages each visitor read while on the site. Here's what the analytics service Quill Engage said about the month:

Pages per session were up 10% to 2.6 and above your average for the year. This suggests users navigated to more pages during their stay last month.

Traffic on mobile devices, again, accounted for most of the visits to the website. And even though mobile was down from November, it was still up 17 percent from December of last year.
• Mobile - 8,830 sessions
• Desktop - 7,581 session
• Tablets - 836 sessions

The top 10 pages for traffic in December represented a nice mix of news, features and opinions. The top page listed below is theorion.com home page. (Click on the graphic to get a larger image).

Dead week was not so dead

A couple of things in the latest Quill Engage report for theorion.com caught my eye this week:
• For the second straight week, The Orion's website gained more visitors than the week before.
• More people used their smartphones to read the news than any other platform.

People visited the site 6,217 times during the week and viewed 16,083 pages. That means the average visitor looked at 2.59 pages, driving the bounce rate (the percentage of visits that consisted of just one page view) down to 35.24 percent. That's very good.

Total traffic also was better than the same week last year, which is pretty exciting.

Besides more traffic, the significant statistic in this paragraph was how people visited. Smartphones were the device of choice by about 40 visits over desktop. That's important, of course, but the trend over a year ago is really important: Mobile-device visits were up 135 percent from a year before.

Editors should be thinking about that as they consider how stories are going to be told via the web next semester.

Here are the top 10 pages visited during dead week (number one is the home page):