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Wonderful Machine saw significant increases in searches as well as improvements in general traffic during the month of August.
During August -4.8% fewer users (8,221) visited the site than in July (8,639), with an associated drop in new users of -3.3%. However, those numbers almost exhaust all of the ill news for the site during August.
Pageviews (each page of the website viewed), pages per session (the number of pages viewed during a session), and sessions per user increased by +7.3, +4.6, and +7.7% respectively, while sessions (the time a user spends on the site visiting multiple pages) decreased slightly by -.7%.
The average session duration and bounce rates for the site both improved by dramatic margins. The average session duration went from 3:43 during July to 4:16 in August, a +15.1% change. In relation to August 2020 when the average session duration was 2:18, this is a +85.8% gain.
The site’s average bounce rate also improved, albeit nominally, dropping from 54.3% in July to 53.6% in August. In relation to August 2020 the improvement is more dramatic, since it had fallen from 65.2%, which is a -17.8 improvement. Remember that a lower bounce rate is desirable.
All photographer searches increased during the month of August, some significantly. As it was, +27% more photographer searches were conducted during August (5,253) in comparison with July (4,136). Searches by specialty increased by a whopping +38.7%, going from 1,426 in July to 1,978 in August.
The most popular type of search, searches by location, increased by +34% during August, with 3,375, as opposed to the 2,519 during July. Searches by date increased +148% in August (1,974) from July (796).
Users searched photographers by name 1,522 times in August, an increase of +25.7% over the 1,211 times in July. There were also more searches for videographers during August (376), +30.5% more than July (288).
Whoa!
The United States was the location for 58.8% of our users during August, followed by India (6.4%) and Brazil (3.9%). The cities from which most users hailed were New York (5.3%), Los Angeles (2.6%), Philadelphia (2.3%), London (1.4%), and Chicago (1.2%).
“Acquisitions” is Google’s term to describe how users arrived at a website — the sources for a site’s traffic. These numbers are important for a variety of reasons, one of which being that they let us know how our efforts in SEO, in web ads, in our social media efforts, and other forms of promotion work.
Since SEO means Search Engine Optimization, the “Organic Search” numbers tell us how effective is our SEO strategy. During August search engines provided 34% of the traffic to Wonderful Machine, which is actually a -49.6% decrease from the 55.9% directed by search engines last year.
The chart below, although drawn according to day and therefore showing the cycles of traffic throughout a week, shows the slight decrease in organic search numbers, just over the last three months.
By contrast, we received 33.6% of our traffic directly (this means that users either type the URL into the address bar or have the site’s address bookmarked), which is actually a +33.6% increase over last year’s 20.8% share of traffic.
Wonderful Machine has two different blogs. The first, called Intel, is designed to provide information germane to the business of being a commercial or editorial photographer. The second, called Published, promotes recent usually published projects by our member photographers.
As a whole, over the month of August, the blogs received 12,606 pageviews, which is a +.8% increase over the 12,509 pageviews of July.
The most popular posts on the Read Intel blog were:
The most popular posts on the Read Published blog were: