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Each month we provide a summary of the traffic Wonderful Machine’s site has received and try to make some modest judgments. Of course, “during COVID” that task has become more difficult, in that there is no period in months or years past with which to compare April’s traffic, its forms, and its sources. As you all know, nothing like this has happened — in our lifetimes (even Bill’s!). Please keep that in mind as you follow through these numbers.
In what follows, we maintain our practice of comparing each month to that preceding and to the same month of the previous year.
Between March and April, the number of users on our site increased by 5.6%. New users, specifically, saw an increase of 8%. Mysteriously, page views were down 4%. This means that more people visited the site than during the month previously, but each visitor viewed fewer pages.
Sessions were up 9%, and sessions per user 4%. Pageviews per session were down 12%, and average session duration down 9%.
Our bounce rate increased by 3%, meaning that more people left directly after landing on the site (frequently a sign that someone made a “wrong turn” to use a driving metaphor). Users, New users, Pageviews, and Sessions are all still down from the same time last year. That being said, the average session duration is up 30% (how long someone spent going through the site during their “sessions”) from the same time last year, which is pretty astounding.
Site events mostly saw decreases over the previous month. Click-throughs — when a user follows a link on our site to a photographer’s site — were down 19%, specialty searches were down 8%, and profile views were down 25%; photographer searches, however, were up 4%. Those numbers are in comparison to March 2020. Compared to April 2019, they are down 28%, 20%, 21%, and 6%, respectively.
Traffic coming from social media has seen an enormous increase since last year at the same time (240%). Interestingly, traffic from email has also increased (93%). Direct referrals are up 6%. Search engine traffic has dropped by 41%, and link referrals are down by 50%. For a more direct understanding, here are the percentages of traffic from each source for this month: Search Engines 43%, Direct 27%, Referrals 12%, Social 13%, Email 10%.
The United States constituted 66% of our traffic in April, followed by India and Canada. The largest numbers of users came from these cities, in order of volume: New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, London, and San Francisco.
The number of visitors to our client blog — the blog featuring spotlight articles on recent projects by member photographers — increased by 47% between March and April and by 110% (go Varun!) between this year and last. By contrast, our member blog — the blog devoted to issues of interest to member photographers (not necessarily clients) — saw decreases of 8% since March and 44% since April 2019.
The top three client blog posts this month were:
The top three member blog posts were: