With the holidays coming to a close, we are delving right back into the deep end of our work here with a solid lesson on custom reports. Custom reports are extremely powerful as they allow you to see truly valuable insights. Everything thus far we have talked about are pre-configured reports. They surely help understand what’s going on, but with data the more specified the better.
But before we go into creating custom reports, let’s survey the numbers for the month of December 2020.
During the month of December, in line with the trends of the previous years, the WonderfulMachine.com had fewer visitors than November. While in November of 2020 we had 11,183 users, that number dropped by -7.7% to 10,322 in December of 2020. Returning users increased by a negligible about, but new users dropped by -7.1%. The site also saw decreases in sessions and pageviews of -3.6% and -1.8%, respectively.
Average session duration, the number of sessions per user, pages per session, and bounce rates all showed improvements: +1.4%, +4.5%, +1.8%, and -3.6% (remember that lower bounce rates are better).
Users clicked-though, or followed the links on our site to a photographer’s website, 2,924 times, which is a decrease of -8.2% between December and November. Users searched through photographers according to specific specialties 5,786 times, which is a decrease of -5.6% from the 6,131 searches conducted in November. Users viewed photographers’ profiles 5,577 times during the month of December, which was also down (-10.7%) from November of 2020. Photographer searches only decreased slightly, from 2,786 times in November to 2,755 times in December, a decrease of -1.1%.
WonderfulMachine.com has two different blogs. The number of visitors to our client blog — the blog featuring spotlight articles on recent projects by member photographers — saw -1% less traffice since November. Yet this is actually a +20% increase in traffic since December of 2019. Similarly, on the member blog — the blog devoted to issues of interest to member photographers (not necessarily clients) — an impressive +26.3% increase since December of 2019 and a more modest increase of +6.8% since November of 2020.
The most popular member blog posts were
The most popular client blog posts were
Okay, now that we’ve reviewed the numbers, let’s go to Customization and then Custom Reports.
From here we can create a New Custom Report.
Let’s create a custom report that shows us what pages users are landing on when they first get to our site! This is a great analytic that isn’t normally shown without quite a bit of filtering. All the while it’s a vital analytic to monitor as it allows us to further set up our sales funnels.
Title the custom report whatever you wish, in this tutorial something like Landing Pages would be an appropriate title.
In the metric group, add the metric Users. If you click on add a metric and type in “Users” it should pop up for you.
After you have selected the metric, go to the filters and just the same way as above add a filter of landing page.
Now all there is to do is save the custom report! Yes, it was that simple. Custom reports can be extremely easy if you know what you are doing. The harder part is finding out what to analyze. I suggest you take some time and look through all the different metrics and filters you can pair with each other. You can do things like page load speed and ecommerce conversions if you have them setup.
Let’s take a look at the report we just created.
Here we can see over the last 5 days we have had 1,776 landing page views over the pages listed above. Obviously, our home page claims the throne, but there are many member blog articles that have been doing well. We can go in and see why later on, but more importantly, optimize them. We see we have pages that are getting organic views from Google, next I would make sure that the meta data all made sense. The meta-title, meta-description, H1’s, keywords density, and everything on-page SEO wise to make that page as streamlined as possible. In doing so you might find why that page ranked decently in the first place, or perhaps it will surprise you that it has more hits than anything else. Anything goes in the SEO world, it’s all about how you handle the transitions and where you go from there.
Next month we will go over dashboards and how to have all your favorite analytics in one place. Making your job a whole lot faster. Stay tuned.
If you’d like help with SEO, feel free to send an email our way or give us a call at 610 260 0200.