The Explorer’s Homecoming Traffic Update

Thanks from all of us at The Explorer for smiles, waves, and kind words we received over Homecoming weekend. It was great to be out enjoying the community with you all, and we are thankful for all the people we got to see, talk to, and photograph. The events put on by the Town of Lincoln were top-notch, but it is the people of our area that really make Homecoming a pleasure.

Your response to our photos and coverage of Homecoming so far has been overwhelming. We only finished editing and posting the last of the concert/fireworks photos today, and still haven’t gone through all the pictures from the 5K race on Sunday. In all we took well over 5000 photos, and so far we have posted about 750 to our Facebook page and website. Our goal was to capture both the feel of the events and also the reactions of the people participating. Your comments and interaction with both sites so far seem to indicate that we were successful.

Several people have asked us how the hits and traffic numbers were over Homecoming, so we thought we’d post a quick update for those who are curious. After looking over the Facebook insights and web server logs, the short answer is: Fantastic!

From a Facebook perspective, our posts have been very well received. As the image above shows, over the past week our page likes have taken off. More importantly, the number of people liking, tagging, and commenting is way up as well. Our prom photos still hold the title for most viewed post (over 9,000 people viewed the MA prom album when it went up), but the number of people interracting with the Homecoming albums are the largest we’ve ever had. And the 7 different albums of Homecoming events have had over 26,000 combined views so far, and the latest album just went up this morning, so we expect that total to continue to climb as people tag and comment.

Our www.pvexplorer.com website has also seen a surge in traffic lately. Our visitor numbers have continued to climb since we revamped the format last month, and the Homecoming content has kept that momentum rolling. Figuring out how many people actually come to your site is almost more of an art than a science, and we use 3 different statistical tools (Google Analytics, AWStats, and Webalizer) to keep track of it all.

We’ve been so busy taking and processing photos and building this week’s newspaper over the last few days that we haven’t had a chance to disect the all data yet. But the rough server log numbers say that we’ve had just under 19,000 visits over the past week, and over 73,500 page views! And no doubt those numbers will continue to climb over the next week or two as people resume their nightly Internet surfing.

So from Patti, Bob, and Steve at The Explorer: Thanks! We appreciate all of you who have encouraged us as we try to build up the paper and website. And a special thanks to the businesses who have advertised with us so far. We appreciate your willingness to give us a chance, and promise to continue to cover the local faces, local names, and local news of the Penobscot Valley region in a way that will bring you the most positive exposure for your advertising dollar.