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| Here's looking at you, Pincher Creek |
This Sunday, July 15, we will be celebrating the 1-year anniversary of this publication.
Here's a little stats crunching.
(Note: the numbers that follow are based upon data gleaned from Google Analytics and other sources on July 8, 2012 as well as personal observation and stats-watching over the course of the last year)
Search engines:
No surprise here, Google dominates the search-engine traffic that leads readers to the Pincher Creek Voice, by 94.17%. Bing comes a very distant second with 3.57%.
Keywords:
"Pincher Creek Voice" and variations is the predominant search term directing traffic to the website.
Referral traffic:
Facebook dominates direct referral traffic to the site, with 80.29%.
Landing page:
The landing page of choice changes rapidly depending on what story is hot at the moment. A consistent page to make the list is our "News" page, which seems to have been bookmarked by many regular readers. The "Sports" page also makes a strong showing most of the year.
Visitors:
In total we've had 256,223 pageviews, just cracking 1/4 million in a year. In the past few months we've been steadily climbing. May 2012 has so far been our busiest month, with more than 40,000 pageviews.
In the last 30 days we had 12,680 "unique" visitors who visited 18,641 times, viewing an average of 1.72 pages a visit, for a total of 31,994 pageviews. 36.72% of those visitors were returning visitors.
Educated guesses:
As near as I can tell, and I think I'm erring on the side of caution, that distills down to about 6000 actual unique individuals visiting in a month, with some using two or more devices (with different ip addresses) or using a connection that changes ip addresses from time to time.
That's roughly calculated two ways:
1) 12,000 visitors (rounded down) divided by 2 devices each = 6000 unique visitors.
2) 18,641 visits (rounded down to 18,000) with about a 3rd visitors (36.72% rounded down to 33.33%) being calculated as "returning" visitors = 6000 unique visitors.
It seems likely we are read by as many people or more who live outside this community as we are by people who live in it. A completely unscientific guess would be that we have about 2000 local readers and about 4000 readers from elsewhere. A great many of those "elsewhere" readers seem to come to the site for very specific reasons, which seem to include favoured columnists, breaking news (missing persons, accidents, etc.), sports stories, high-profile news from the area, etc. Some of that "elsewhere" traffic also seems to come from other media providers, probably researching their own stories. Recently we have had some stories that neared the 1000 view mark almost immediately upon publication, and they skew the overall results a bit.
Awkward stats:
Some stories we work on for hours and hours, days even, only to see very few people actually interested in them. Some stories take a few minutes, such as police reports, and go through the roof stats-wise.
That's just the nature of the biz.
We'll continue to cover those stories that we can guess ahead of time only a few are interested in, because those few are usually quite interested in them, and are for the most part local people wanting specifically local news. Local content continues to be our primary self-imposed mandate.
Video/YouTube:
We were originally hosting our YouTube videos on a different account. Since switching all our YouTube videos to the "Pincher Creek Voice" account last fall our channel has received 24,702 visits. We've posted 245 videos. That rounds down to about 100 views per video on average, to date, viewed through YouTube directly. However, because we also embed our videos in our stories, we have no way to accurately count the real total views of any video. YouTube either doesn't count embedded video views or else counts them "incrementally", so it seems likely our video view-count is much higher. We're working on ways to track this better, including asking you how you view our videos, if you do. In the meantime, we're convinced video is the way of the present, and are working at improving our delivery of it all the time.
Our videos range in length from under a minute to over an hour.
Revenue:
Our revenue is insufficient but steadily increasing. How's that for frank? With readership numbers like ours, we're quite confident that or revenue will continue to increase.
Audience:
Our all-time audience stats by nation (top ten) break down this way
- Canada - 184,517 (pageviews)
- United States - 44,168
- United Kingdom - 2,809
- Ukraine - 2,473
- Germany - 2,376
- Philippines - 2,171
- France - 1,153
- China - 1,144
- Netherlands - 988
- Russia - 535
Sunday's edition will include a "where are we going from here" editorial and hopefully a retrospective on the last year, time allowing.
The only answer to, 'where are we going from here?', would be upward and onward! Great Stats from around the world!
ReplyDeleteCongratulations on your first anniversary! Keep up the great work!
ReplyDeleteCoffee and cigarettes. Sleepless nights. Banging away on the old Underwood. Whiskey in the drawer. The newsman craves only one thing - the Story.
ReplyDeleteWe are blessed to bask in the glow of a non-corporate news medium in Pincher Creek. We ought to be both amazed and thankful. The Voice is just that - a voice for us all. There are our lives, replete with pain and laughter. If it were not for the chroniclers, there would be no history, and therefore nothing to either lament or celebrate. We can only hope that such 'speaking' may continue. Without it, the silence looms - or worse, the lies.