Ever since I got out of newspapers and began working for the USTFCCCA in August of 2015, I had to figure out a new way to quantify my impact as an employee.
In newspapers, particularly during my time as a page designer at the Athens Banner-Herald, I relied on certain benchmarks like how the elements on my pages accentuated the stories, the physical layout and things of that nature. From the first page I designed in Athens to the final one in August of 2015, I felt I made progress.
Now that I’m in more of a public relations/marketing role, my focus has changed. No longer am I creating something that I can hold or see on a newsstand. Everything I put out now ends up on our website; so with that, I began focusing on page views.
No matter the medium, page views are driven by the quality of content and I knew with my journalism background that quality content wouldn’t be a problem.
And the numbers prove just that.
Since August of 2015, page views have increased quite a bit on the USTFCCCA website. I could almost call it a coincidence, but I know we’re doing great work.
If you look at the graphic I made for the featured image, the red bars signify the numbers from 2014. The green bars are what we’ve done with me on the staff.
Both September and October saw 23-percent increases over the previous year. Then in November, we shattered single-day and monthly page view records. And while December’s numbers dropped, the NCAA Division II Cross Country Championships were held in December last year, so that accounts for many of those lost hits — and even knowing that, those numbers aren’t bad in a down month.
From here on out, my goal is for those numbers to continue to trend upward and to grow our reach on Facebook and Twitter. I already started doing great things on Facebook with our “Facebook Feature Friday” series (more on that another time) and Twitter has been strong, but I would like to see it as strong during track season as it is during cross country season.