What could possibly make a webpage’s traffic grow by 235 percent in one year? Our beautiful campus of course!

Last September we launched “Photo of the Day (opens new window)”, a social campaign that focuses on the beauty and uniqueness of our campus and Midtown. The positive reaction has been overwhelming, not only in positive comments, but in positive statistics as well.

Stat overview:

Since September 2015:

• We have received 658* submissions
• From 275 individuals in the campus community
• 337 pics have been featured on the site so far.

*41 of the 658 submissions were duplicates or contained broken files. The total of photographs up for consideration is 617.

Submissions

Submissions have grown nearly 600 percent from 2015 to 2016 with a large jump in October.

What is equally as impressive, the quality of the submissions are getting greater each month. Don't get me wrong, we've always had high quality photos to showcase, but in the last two months, the quantity of high quality photographs is dramatically higher.

Web traffic

This is first and foremost a social campaign, but of course it has to live on the web. We share the lastest pic on Instagram (opens new window), Twitter (opens new window) and we recently added it to our Facebook page (opens new window). All posts link back to the Photo of the Day website (opens new window).

Unique page visits have grown more than 230 percent from 2015 to 2016. Again, with the most significant jump last month.

Our highest traffic day was October 5, 2016 with 158 unique visits featuring the work of Paige Urbano (opens new window).

Social stat - Most liked and most retweets

Our most ‘liked’ pic on Instagram and most retweeted post featured the work of Tyler Neal (opens new window). This one is a personal favorite as well.

Social stats - Most impressions

The Photo of the Day tweet with the most impressions (nearly 11,000) was submitted by Justin Jacob (opens new window). Justin has been a frequent submitter and you can routinely see his work featured on the Wayne State homepage (opens new window).

Looking ahead

In the last few months we started featuring some Photos of the Day on the university homepage (opens new window) and although we can't get stats on each pic featured, we are again getting very positive feedback. With the success of this feature, we are exploring other avenues to share this extraordinary content.

Submit yours!

Even though the popularity has grown so much, we are still strongly encouraging the community to send in your campus pics! We want to show off campus from everyone's perspective not just our own.

See the latest selections and submit your own pics at wayne.edu/photo-of-the-day (opens new window)