FINAL WEBSITE MARKETING CAMPAIGN & TRAFFIC RESULTS BY KRITIKA KULSHRESTHA

Final websitetraffic&marketingppt from kritika27

Reporting Texas Analytics by Sheila Buenrostro

Reporting Texas is a news website put together by journalism students at the University of Texas at Austin. The website has a simple and clean look. The layout makes the website easy to navigate. The header at the top displays the different categories used to organize the articles. Below the header there are previews of the articles.

The site traffic is not heavy since there have only been a total of 974 visitors with most of them coming from the United States. The average length of time on the site has been 52 seconds. The bounce back rate is 79.26%. In addition the new visitor rate is high at 80.8%. However the return rate is low at 19.2%. The website benefits from having a high rate of new visitors but it would benefit more if those visitors kept coming back to the website.

Overall I think the design and layout of Reporting Texas fits the purpose of the website. I would however suggest they add a slideshow, with previews of the articles, below the header. I do believe they can do a better job at marketing the website. I would suggest they post a link to the website in the College of Communication and Class of 2013 Facebook groups. Most of the communication students are a part of these groups. As soon as more people find out about it they will surely visit it.

Reporting Texas Analytics - Jasmine Alexander

What I found most interesting about the analytics for Reporting Texas were the cities that we accessing the webpage. As expected, users located in Austin were visiting the site the most (roughly 257 visits). Other Texas cities like Houston, San Antonio, and Dallas also had high rates of users accessing the Reporting Texas website. This is also expected since content for the website also covers news on Texas. What was interesting, as well as surprising, were the views, albeit small, from New York (16 views) and Denver (14 views).  While these cities had a very low number of people viewing the Reporting Texas website, those who did view it tended to stay longer (NY: 1:56, Denver: 2:07) as compared to Texas cities.

On the flip side, the analytics report showed that users from Lufkin, Texas had a 100% bounce rate despite the fact that it had 20 visits.

Reporting Texas - Lydia Herrera

During my research I was interested to learn the measure of loyal visitors the site has. I started at the start of September up to November 14. I found that the top 3 cities visiting the site are Austin (1, 376 visits), Houston (521 visits) and San Antonio (495 visits). Next I took a look at the difference between new visitors and returning visitors. New visitors measured out to about 6, 217 new visitors vs. 1, 029 returning visitors. Visitors spent an average of :34 seconds on a page. This leads me to wonder what SEO practices the site is using to attract unique visitors via search engines and what marketing efforts the site is using to build their base of loyal readers.

Rachel Marino - Reporting Texas GA

I found it interesting that the "page depth" people are willing to go to drops off greatly after two pages - 925 people engaged with one page, 123 with two, and only 48 with three. While a few go as far as 5 pages into a story, very few go beyond that. I've never thought about "page depth" this way and this gives us a good idea of the general Reporting Texas readers' attention span. Besides ideal story length, this could also tell Reporting Texas that it's likely better to have one or two long web pages rather than splitting up articles or multimedia into several pages, if you want readers to continue to the end.

Reporting Texas

The Google Analytics for Reporting Texas reveal a few interesting aspects of reader behavior. For example, readers are only spending an average of 52 seconds on the site. This could be improved by including better information in the article metadata and subheads, so that readers aren't clicking to articles they have no interest in reading. I also would suggest ensuring that social media posts that lead inbound to the page are accurately describing the article.

Additionally, most inbound traffic is coming from organic search, which is typical and means that the site ranks well, followed by direct search. Only 61 views come from social, which means that a lot more can be done to improve the reach of each article. Reporting Texas is beneficial for student bylines, but readership of articles is more important than just having them online.

Rebecca Wright- Reporting Texas Analytics

Something I found surprising about the website's analytics was the number of new versus returning visitors. The number of returning visitors was 187 compared to 787 new visitors. These numbers surprised me because I was sure that the people who visit Reporting Texas the most frequently would be students, teachers and relatives, and they would continue to regularly visit the site. I thought returning visitors would far outnumber new visitors. Maybe the difference in these numbers is because of efficient social media promotion or search engine optimization resulting in new users to follow a link to the site. 

I was also interested to learn that Safari was the search engine most used to access Reporting Texas. This surprised me because we learned this semester that Chrome is the most used browser worldwide. 

Jackie Kuenstler - Reporting Texas Google Analytics

One thing I found very interesting in the Reporting Texas analytics was that you can look specifically at which browser people are using to view the website. It's interesting to note that there is quite a significant difference between some of the users of different browsers. For example, Chrome and Firefox users spend more that twice as much time on the Reporting Texas website than people coming from any other browser. Maybe this implies that the website runs better on these browsers, or maybe the users of Chrome and Firefox are in a different demographic that is more interested in the content of this website. The bounce rate on Chrome and Firefox is also about 10% lower than any other browser.

Kendall Ivie, Analytics for Reporting Texas

Something that I thought was interesting is that a lot of views come from mobile devices. This is interesting because it allows us more insight on who our users might be. Since people seem to enjoy reading Reporting Texas on their mobile devices, I would suggest looking into getting an app. I think this would also appeal to the millennial generation and allow them to get faster access to this site.

Lydia Schendel - Reporting Texas Google Analytics

I found it interesting that the two most common referrers to Reporting Texas are Facebook and Twitter. From this, I can tell that the website does a lot of promotion through social media, which seems to be effective in bringing in views. 

I also found an interesting relationship between the type of referrer and the time spent on the site. While social media may bring in views, those viewers aren’t sticking to the site as long as other types of visitors.

Visitors that came from Facebook spent less than 1 minute on the site on average this year. Visitors that came from dallasnews.com stayed on the site for 1.5 minutes, and visitors that came from UT’s School of Journalism website stayed for almost 2 minutes. Visitors that come from journalism-oriented sites are likely more interested in news content, so they will stay on the site longer. Visitors that happen to come across a social media post will likely read that one story that caught their eye and then move on. Reporting Texas can target loyal visitors on journalism-oriented websites, and recruit new visitors by posting on social media.

Mary Ellen - Reporting Texas Analytics

One interesting fact: According to Google Analytics, the age group that visits Reporting Texas' website most frequently is the 25-34 group, comprising 33.5 percent of total visitors. The second-most frequent visitor group is the 18-24 demographic, comprising 27.5 percent of total visitors.

This is not necessarily surprising, since the reporters consist of undergrad and graduate students. They may be sharing articles with other peer as well. Reporting Texas may want to keep their current readership in mind and tailor its content. Or someone should continue to monitor how the age distribution changes distribution if they decide they would like to target a more diverse readership.

Rachel Perlmutter Portfolio

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Final project

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