Marketing and Audience Engagement
Analytics & SEO
Analytics
The main way we measure website engagement is through SNO’s analytics. The trending stories feature allows me to see how many views that recent stories get. I can connect this data to what stories the student body wants to see reported. We also will occasionally get spikes in views, and SNOs analytics allows us to look at what stories caused the spike.
We’ve also noticed an uptick in views from China this year showing up in our analytics. When I noticed that we had a sudden spike in views over the course of a month, I looked at the map feature and noticed that more of those views were from China than they were from the United States. I spoke with our Technology Editor and we reached out to SNO support about eliminating bot activity. While we can’t get rid of it completely, we were able to get the numbers down significantly.
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SEO
I started learning about SEO junior year when I was looking into ways to increasing views on our website. I read through articles about what SEO is and what it meant to use it to increase website traffic. I installed the All In One SEO plugin and used that to analyze our website’s usage of SEO.
SNO's SEO features allows one to analyze their article's SEO.
Promotion
We also started promoting the website more around the school. Primarily, we started promoting the website more in the print magazine. We added QR codes to the news briefs page so people know they can go to the website and read news and sports stories. We also hung posters around the school promoting our online content.
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Games
We’ve also seen student engagement from adding a games page. Getting people to come to the website for the games means they may end up reading some stories. We also incorporate news into a lot of the games so students can know what is going on at West and beyond.
A mini crossword is published on the games page every week.