Our post on scholastic media traffic data a couple weeks ago had a data category called "Bounce Rate." Essentially, bounce rate is when someone goes to one page of your site and then doesn't continue to a second. Statistically, you want a low number for your bounce rate. Work to keep visitors on your site longer. Check out these 5 tips to lower your bounce rate from Mallary Jean Tenore. Mallory gives suggestions ranging from giving them more of the content they are clicking on to linking to related content within your site.

Of late, the news out of Carmel (IN) High School hasn’t been all that great. The men’s varsity basketball team has been at the center of a controversy involving alleged incidents of bullying, which has led to police investigations and additional claims of harassment, sexual misconduct, criminal confinement and criminal deviate conduct. This has led to an ongoing story covered by both the HiLite – CHS’s student news publication – and professional news outlets.

That being said, this is not yet an article about that incident, although from a scholastic news organization’s standpoint the story has provided a tremendous real-time opportunity to teach journalism students about news and the role a publication plays in disseminating that news to its readers. It’s also been a prime opportunity to illustrate how having an online component can help to provide breaking news as it happens. However, that story I’ll save for later; we’re still in the midst of the investigation and the student editors are still covering that story as it unfolds.

Rather, what this article will cover is how you and your online staff can use online tools – specifically the annotation tool in Google Analytics and the tracking information embedded in the dashboard of WordPress – to track your online traffic. I mention the basketball incident because it is relevant to this discussion.

Early in February, I made an all-call to three different organizations, comprised of more than 1,100 individuals involved in scholastic media, asking them to share their site's Web traffic data. Twenty-one sites shared their visitor data so that we can have a first look into traffic generated on scholastic media sites.

I've had a few people ask me recently about traffic numbers that scholastic sites are getting. Schools are just wanting a gauge of how their numbers compare. This is a call for those of you with sites to help me out a bit if you can.

There are numerous ways a staff can promote it's site. One way is by creating something your readers want. Late last summer the Des Moines Register created high school football schedules that readers could download and set as the wallpaper of their desktop.