Using Analytics to Boost Site Traffic

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So you read last week’s SNO Report, took our advice, and dug into your site’s analytics via the SNO Analytics plugin and/or the Google Analytics dashboard. Now what?

The sky’s the limit when it comes to interpreting all that data, but if boosting site traffic is your goal, here are a few suggestions to get you started.

  1. Story Views – Which stories are generating the most views, and what do they have in common? Maybe it’s photos, interactive elements like polls, or just more mentions of students at your school. Whatever it is, try to emulate it in your other stories.

  2. Bounce Rate – Bounce rate refers to the percentage of site visitors who view only one page before leaving, so aim to keep it as low as possible. Try to decrease it by encouraging visitors to click through to other site content. Use one of the Sidebar templates (and make sure you have widgets in the sidebar), or consider a Related Stories or Story Collections SNO Story element to make more content readily accessible (and clickable) as visitors interact with your stories.

  3. Acquisition – Note which method of acquisition is most popular, and aim to boost the others. For example, ask the school to share a link to your site on the school website to improve referral traffic, or share links to new stories on social media to increase organic social traffic. The more ways people are getting to your site, the better.

  4. Retention – Aim to increase the number of repeat site visitors. Our biggest suggestion is publishing content at established intervals to keep people to regularly returning. You can get creative here, or check out the ideas we shared earlier this year to generate some ideas.

  5. Tech – Which devices are people using to view your site? If you have a lot of mobile users (we’re guessing you probably do), make sure your site’s mobile appearance looks the way you want or consider adding the Student News Source app to your account to drive even more mobile traffic.

Most importantly, we hope you and your staff will take time to reflect on what you found when exploring your analytics. Celebrate your strengths, make an action plan to address any weaknesses, and set some goals for the future.