Analytics and The Student Life

Over the summer, I singlehandedly undertook the rather daunting task of redesigning the website of my school’s student newspaper, The Student Life. I’d never designed a site of its scale before and the experience substantially aided my growth as both a designer and a developer. In building it, I gained exposure to Joomla, Google Adsense, Disqus, and social media integration, among many other tools and techniques.

While it’s still a work in progress and I’m continually looking for ways to improve the site, it has been visited over 75,000 times and amassed over 185,000 page views since its initial launch last September. Before its launch, I don’t think a site of mine had accumulated more than a few thousand visits, so this was a pretty big deal. One of the aspects I enjoy about having such a relatively large amount of traffic is being able to explore trends in its Google Analytics data.

The site, for example, tends to get a three- to four-fold jump in traffic on Fridays, when we post new content. When Google News began to index our content, its overall traffic increased substantially. Over eighty percent of the site’s traffic comes from search engines or referring sites. As such, our most viewed articles tend to relate to national politics, current issue, a particular time of year or particularly poignant on-campus issues. As a matter of fact, our third most searched keyword is currently “heidi montage,” beating out “the student life pomona” and “student life” and only trailing “the student life” and “tsl pomona.”

This past semester, we have averaged between 1,000 and 1,500 visits on Fridays and between 300 and 500 visits during the rest of the week. A couple Mondays ago, however, my inbox became inundated with an unusual number of notifications concerning comments on a single article that were awaiting moderation. The article had been published that previous Friday and reminisced over Butler’s loss to Duke in the Men’s NCAA Division I National Championship Game. The comments were strongly supportive of Duke and very quickly became deeply personal about both the article’s author and our school. As I explored this explosion of comments further, our Analytics data revealed that the site’s traffic that day had rocketed to 5,199–over three times as many visits as our next most frequented day. A closer look showed that over 4,600 of this visits had come from a single site, dukebasketballreport.com. My best guess is that our article showed up in someone’s Google News Alerts when they got to work on Monday and referred it to Duke Basketball Report, where the wrath of Duke’s loyal fans was directed toward our site and our poor author’s article.

It still amazes me how effectively Google has helped to make seemingly limitless amounts of information so easily accessible. At what other point in time has groups action been so easily and quickly organized, allowing hoards of Duke fans to stomp all over an article from a small student newspaper on the opther side of the country just days after its initial publication?

You can view the article and its rather entertaining thread of comments here.