Just how important is the Chapter News department of your magazine? It’s very important, and I’ll show you why.

Two months ago, Lambda Chi Alpha stopped printing and mailing its magazine the Cross & Crescent.

The magazine is now released only online in three formats (XHTML, PDF, RSS) on the second of every month at www.crossandcrescent.com. We also send out a teaser email reminding folks to return to the site to get the latest issue (image to right).

So what does this all mean to you? Stats — and lot’s of them.

Now that everything is electronic, we’re able to accurately measure how many people visit the website, what they prefer to read, how log it takes them to read it, how many opened the email we sent them, and what they first clicked on that interest them.

Most of this aggregate data is collected automatically using common software that is installed on web servers. Other tracking tools we installed or license from third-party providers like Constant Contact and Google Analytics (image to left).

For example, I know that 40.4 percent of my audience will first select Chapter News, will spend an average 1:39 minutes reading this page, and has a 54 percent likelihood of leaving the site after reading only this section.

Those are some amazing numbers for a single department. Granted, our Chapter News department combines chapter news, alumni news, and reports of death within a single section. But stats are stats. These numbers tell me there is nothing more important to our members than news from or about their chapter. Most will get in, see if there is any news, and then leave — not bothering too look at the rest of the magazine.

That’s right, our two feature stories attracted only 10.42 and 6.83 percent of our audience respectively. All of that hard work, personal interviews, photo shoots, etc. for little attraction.

Now that we have access to what interest our members, we’re able to act accordingly. Our first issue, chapter news represented just three of our 16 pages. After seeing these stats, we bumped chapter news up to five of 16 pages. I’m considering adding a few more pages to this section if I think it can be sustained.

So what is the lesson here? As editors, though we love feature stories, the real attraction is clearly chapter news. The numbers don’t lie.

This entry was posted on Monday, December 5th, 2005 at 9:04 pm and is filed under Editing, Survey, Technology, Websites. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.