August has come and gone. Summer is ending and the normal routine is starting again. Kids are going back to school and after that one last barbecue on Labor Day, the traditional start of the theatre season will be upon us again. As we wrap up the summer at UTBA, we took a look back at this month, as we do every month, and found a few surprises. First, we broke almost every web site traffic record that we had previously set. The increase in site traffic occurred despite the web site being down for five days! Thanks to you, we keep growing. Second, we were impressed by the response we had to this month’s ticket giveaways. We intend to continue those in the future.

Announcements

  • As mentioned above, the web site was down for five days in August. It was taken down for an infrastructure change and to upgrade security. Thank you for bearing with us.
  • When the web site was changed, we temporarily lost some of the images associated with some of our previous posts. Please be patient as we restore those.
  • We received some new reviewer applications this month. Because of the web site revamp and other events in our volunteer staff’s lives, we’ve been a little slow in responding to those. As things calm down, we’ll follow up on those applications.
  • During August we had three highly successful ticket giveaways: two to the West Valley Hale and one to the Utah Shakespeare Festival. If you would like to sponsor a ticket giveaway to an upcoming show, email dave (at) utahtheatrebloggers (dot) com.
  • We’ve reformatted how we review staged readings and works in progress. Three recent reviews have been written under these new guidelines (A Doll’s House, Making Waves, and Little Happy Secrets). The new format emphasizes the script and feedback for the playwright.
  • There are more web site changes coming in the future. We’ll still provide reviews and interviews, but we’ll be expanding to other types of content, too (slowly). As always, our goal will still be to strengthen the state’s theatre community and encouraging people to talk about Utah live theatrical productions.

Visitors

  • 5,525 unique visitors (25.9% increase)
  • 7,791 visits (8.9% increase)
    • Visitors were from all 50 states, 60 foreign countries, and the District of Colombia.
    • 5,166 (66.3%) visits were from people in Utah.
      • 1,802 from Salt Lake City (34.9% of Utah visits)
      • 548 from Provo (10.6%)
      • 479 from Midvale (9.3%)
      • 453 from Orem (8.8%)
      • 205 from West Jordan (4.0%)
    • California, Texas, Colorado, and New York combined to represent 14.2% of visits.
  • 24,361 pageviews (25.9% increase)
  • 3.13 pages per visit (13.6% decrease)
  • Average visit length is 1 minute, 44 seconds (27.1% decrease)
  • 63.7% of visitors were new visitors to UTBA
  • 10.5% of visitors have visited UTBA more than 50 times since the site started.

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