In respect of both quantity and quality, the analytics numbers for WonderfulMachine.com took a bath during the month of April 2022. Many say, well, this is just seasonal, right?
I think everyone is so fascinated by the private life of Johnny Depp that they are not paying attention to commercial and editorial photography!
During April 2022 Google Analytics recorded drops in both the numbers of users, sessions, and pageviews as well as in signs of engagement. Only 9,018 users visited wonderfulmachine.com during April, which is a -9.8% drop from the 10,002 users seen in March. Similarly, those users started 12,817 sessions and conducted 32,689 pageviews, -9 and -14.1% decreases over March. In relation to April 2021, those percentage changes were mainly the same, except that we had 48,352 pageviews in April 2021, which makes the current stat a -32.6% drop!
Those figures represent the quantity of traffic. The quality of traffic is expressed by the sessions per user, the pageviews per session, the average session duration, and the bounce rate.
April 2022 had only 1.42 sessions per user, whereas March 2022 had 1.43. A negligible adjustment. Users viewed 2.55 pages per session during April, as opposed to the 2.66 of March, a -4% decline. The average session duration lasted only 3:29 during April, while in March it was 3:43, a -6.2% decrease.
You think with everything decreasing we could count on a bounce rate decline, which would be a good thing! The bounce rate is always better when it is lower because it counts the percentage of times a user opens but then immediately leaves or does not interact with your website within 30 minutes. However, the bounce rate increased from 58.2 to 58.9%, which is a +1.3% increase (to be honest, if all the other numbers were negative and the bounce rate improved, I’d be suspicious).
Are you confused? Keep in mind that these numbers change from month to month. Last month it was all sunshine. This month, showers … So don’t jump ship, and remember the words of Captain Jack Sparrow, “wherever we want to go, we’ll go.”
Given the numbers above, you can probably guess what I’m going to say about April’s photographer searches. They decreased. Again, were they to increase but all other site analytics worsen, I would be confused.
Basic searches for photographers, irrespective of location, specialty, name, or date, decreased. While users conducted 5,740 searches in March, they conducted 4,195 in April. This is a -26.9% drop in the number of searches.
Searches by specialty decreased by -19.7% (from March’s 1,713 to April’s 1,376). Location searches, which are the most important type of search, also decreased from 4,795 in March to 3,623 in April, a -24.4% drop. Searches by date decreased by -21.2%, and searches by name by -46.7% (Mamma mia!).
Once those photographer searches are performed and a number of photographer records are shown, we count how many times each month a website, Instagram account, LinkedIn profile, and other links are clicked.
Perhaps the most important of those diverse clicks is website clicks, and those, my friend, did not decrease so dramatically. Users followed photographer website links 6,488 times in March and 6,067 in April, a mere -6.5% decrease. Instagram and LinkedIn clicks suffered like the French at Agincourt: Instagram clicks fell by -40.1 and LinkedIn clicks by -47.1%, respectively. With that said, there were not nearly as many IG and LI clicks in March as there were French soldiers killed at Agincourt (15,000?). March saw 1,450 Instagram clicks, April 850; March saw 620 LinkedIn clicks, April 328.
So, were you particularly headstrong and irreverent, you might ask, was there any good news last month? Strangely, it was on the blog(s) actually, which saw 13,040 pageviews, a +5.1% over the 12,404 of March!
In fact, average page time increased, entrances increased (when someone comes to the site to one of the blogs), the bounce rate decreased, and exits decreased! Average page time on the blogs increased +3.5% to 2:14, entrances increased +6.9%, the bounce rate decreased .8% (we’ll take it!), and exits decreased by .4%!
Back to the words of Jack “not all treasure is silver and gold, mate.”
Wonderful Machine has two different blogs. The first, called Intel, is designed to provide information relevant to the business of being a commercial or editorial photographer. The second, called Published, promotes recent projects (that were either published or used commercially) by our member photographers.
On the Intel blog, the most popular posts were:
On the Published blog, the most popular posts were:
Have you seen this warning or received the email from Google about it?
Google Analytics is “sunsetting” Universal Analytics, which is the type of version of Google Analytics that we have been enjoining photographers to implement over the past few years. Instead, site owners are being asked to implement GA4. I have hesitated to tell photographers to use GA4 because it is more geared to e-commerce, and therefore does not necessarily add many features. However, one feature that it does add is event tracking without encountering the mysteries of Google Tag Manager.
At any rate, now you have no choice. So I’ll leave you with a parting Cap’n Jack quote, “if you were waiting for the opportune moment, that was it.”
Questions about interpreting your analytics? Reach out and let us help