Another exciting month has passed at UTBA. We had our first mention in the print media, expanded the number of reviewers, and reviewed 19 very different shows. Looking back, we had a successful month. After seeing the stats, we hope you’ll agree.
Visitors
The number of visitors to the UTBA site was down slightly in March. We had 1,294 unique visitors (a decrease of 12.7%) making 2,448 separate visits to the UTBA site (down 14.0%). We believe that this drop in site traffic is due to the fact that fewer shows were reviewed, and more of the shows were short run productions. Visitors have viewed a total of 10,300 pages on the UTBA site (4.21 pages/visit or 7.96 pages/unique visitor). So, although the number of visitors was down, the number of pages per visit is up significantly. Average time spent on the UTBA web site is also up by 5.45% to 2 minutes and 42 seconds.
The most popular reviews for March are BYU’s end of semester Divine Comedy show, A Flickering (where there was a lively discussion in the comments section), SCERA’s Les Misérables School Edition, SCERA’s Once Upon a Mattress, and Plan B Theatre Company’s Amerigo. By the way, this is the first time ever that two reviews of the same company have both been among the top 5 most read reviews in a month. Congratulations to SCERA!
In April, 80.9% of our visits came from people in Utah, which is almost the exact same as in February and March. We think that this proportion of Utah visits will stay stable in the future. The other states in the top 5 were Texas, California, Colorado, and Washington, which combined provided 8.1% of visits. This is the first time that New York has been outside of the top 5—Washington having bumped the Empire State down to the #6 spot. In total, we received visits from 40 states, the District of Columbia, and 23 foreign countries during April.
Consistent with past months, Salt Lake City has provided us with the most visits from within Utah to the web site (34.5%), with Provo (19.4%), Orem (14.4%), Springville (8.5%), and Midvale (7.3%) rounding out the top 5. These were the same five cities that gave us the most visitors in February and March. Although the order of these cities is the same as last month, the proportion of visitors from Provo and Orem is higher, probably because of the two SCERA shows that were among our most read reviews of the month. Our visits from outside Salt Lake and Utah counties continues to rise.
Visitor loyalty continues to rise. 55.2% of UTBA visits are from people who have been to the site before. Over half of the people who visited the site in April have done so at least 15 times (since UTBA’s inception), and over 10% have visited the site over 100 times!
Sources of traffic
There was a major change in our sources of traffic in April. For the first time ever, Google over took Facebook as our greatest source of visitors (28.7% compared to 24.2%). Our other three greatest sources of traffic were direct traffic (bookmarking or typing in the site’s address, with 23.2%), blogs (5.8%), and email links (5.7%). Incidentally, our sixth greatest source of traffic was Plan B Theatre Company’s web site. This is the first time that a theatre company’s web site has been a significant source of traffic. Thank you, Plan B!
Although overall traffic is down, we’re still pleased with the readership stats from April and we anticipate May to be another strong month. Over the course of the month, we anticipate that we will add reviewer bios and other information that readers may find interesting. We still need your help, though. We’re looking for reviewers—especially outside of Salt Lake and Utah counties—and we would love you to join our Facebook group. We also invite you to advertise your production with us and to send us feedback on the site. Just like our reviews, we would like to know what we’re doing right and what we’re doing wrong.
