If I could choose one word to describe UTBA’s second month, it would be growth. Almost every possible measure of visitor traffic has risen. We’re noticing more blogs linking to us and we’ve gained almost 150 Facebook fans—that’s an average of about 5 per day! We’re quickly becoming a noticed voice in the Utah theatre community and we’re gaining a loyal following of readers.
Visitors
We have had 1,483 unique visitors making 2,848 separate visits to the UTBA site. Compared to our first month, the number of both unique visitors and number of visits has risen by over 40%. Visitors have viewed a total of 10,994 pages on the UTBA site (3.86 pages/visit or 7.41 pages/unique visitor). The average person spends 2 minutes and 34 seconds on each visit to our site. Page views are up 130%, pages per visit are up 62%, visits per unique visitor are up 58%, and time per visit is up 8%. This means that we have more readers viewing more pages and staying longer on the site.
Another sign of increased visitor traffic is that 8 reviews had more readers than the most popular review in February. The most popular reviews for March are Pioneer Theatre Company’s Our Town, BYU’s As You Like It, Spanish Fork’s The Wizard of Oz, Mortal Fools Theatre Project’s The Glass Menagerie, and BYU’s Blood Wedding. Unlike last month, all of these productions were reviewed elsewhere, except The Wizard of Oz.
Approximately the same percentage of web site visits came from Utah (80.7%). And just like last month, Texas, California, New York and Colorado provided the next highest numbers of visitors (combined, 7.4% of visits). During March we received visits from 41 states, the District of Columbia, and 23 foreign countries.
Within Utah, Salt Lake City has provided us with the most visits to the web site (34.4%), with Provo (18.0%), Orem (10.8%), Springville (9.2%), and Midvale (9.1%) rounding out the top 5. These were the same five cities that gave us the most visitors in February, too (although Midvale was #4 last month and Springville was #5). We have more visitors from outside Salt Lake and Utah counties this month, thanks to reviews of productions that were playing in places like Ogden, and Park City.
Visitor loyalty is still high. 53.7% of UTBA visits are from people who have been to the site before (a rate higher than last month’s 49.1%). Apparently, the majority of web site visitors like what they see, because they’re coming back to UTBA.
Sources of traffic
Just like last month, Facebook was our most popular source of traffic, providing 33% of our visitors. 26.6% of visits are direct visits (bookmarking or typing in the site’s address). Search engines accounted for a larger proportion of our traffic sources than they did last month—20.4%. This is probably because we were not indexed with Google and other search engines for the entire month of February. Finally, blogs provided 6.2% of visitors, and news feeds (including Google News and Twitter) provided 5.8% of visitors to the web site.
No matter how you measure it, UTBA has grown in March, and we hope to continue to grow in the months ahead. But despite the impressive statistics, we’re happiest with the fact that our readers are becoming more engaged through comments on our reviews and our Facebook wall. We love the feedback, because it furthers the conversation about productions and theatre in Utah. To help UTBA grow, you might also consider becoming a reviewer, inviting UTBA to your show, and advertising your production or auditions on the UTBA web site.
