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Being the beginning of March, it’s time to do the monthly analytics and report the site’s numbers. Fortunately, we have good news to report and the kind of news to make you think.
Having been in touch with a number of member photographers recently discussing analytics and SEO, I can tell you that these numbers can be complicated. Google Analytics records all of our traffic and those numbers allow us to see how many people have visited the site, how long they’ve spent, if they’ve been repeat visitors, what pages they are visiting, and a host of other information(s).
But making sense of those numbers is more challenging.
To begin with, between this month and last, the number of site users dropped nominally (from 11,445 to 11,106, which is -3%), but the drop was more significant in relation to last year at the same time (13,993). The categories of new users, returning users, and sessions showed similar changes between months (-5%, -10%, and -.5% respectively).
These decreases, however, were countered by significant gains in pageviews, session duration, and bounce rate: from 46,803 to 48,713 (+4%), from 2:38 to 2:50 (+7.35%), and from 61.4% to 60.6% (+1.3% change—remember that lower bounce rates are better). Moreover, the session duration has increased +26% since last year.
So what does this panoply of fascinating digits mean? Well, at least in part, what we’ve given up in quantity, we’ve gained in quality.
Click-throughs, or instances when users followed a site link to a photographer’s site, decreased slightly between January and February (5,535 to 5,102, or -7%); since last year those click-throughs have only decreased -4%. There were 7,164 specialty searches on the site during the month of February, compared with 6,682 in January (+7%) and 7,341 last February (-3%).
Profile views saw increases both over last month and last year. Photographers had their profiles viewed 13,447 times in February, as opposed to 12,287 in January and 12,282 times in February 2019. Finally, there were 8,988 searches for photographers in February, but 9,178 in January (-2%), and 10,219 in February 2019 (-12%).
The source of the traffic comes from, in brief, four different channels: search engines, direct (URL input by user), social media, and referrals. Search engine traffic decreased by -18% since last year at this time, whereas the number of direct traffic increased by +9.8%. Referrals dropped by -40% while social media leads increased by a gobsmacking +105% (from 507 last year to 1043 this year). Traffic from email increased by +21.3% since last year.
Of those users, 65% were from the United States, 4.9% from India, and 4.7% were from Canadia. Cities represented included New York (6.6%), Los Angeles (3%), Chicago (2.1%) and London (1.9%).
729 users were directed to the site from Facebook, as compared with 1,163 during the month of January (-37%); 109 users arrived from LinkedIn, in contrast to 97 in January (+12.8%); and 78 users came from Instagram, whereas 80 came in January (-2.5%). Our Facebook page now has a total of 7,038 likes and 7,635 follows. Our most popular Facebook post was on Edward Linsmeier, with a close second by the most recent post of Executive Producer Craig Oppenheimer’s ever popular Pricing & Negotiating series. Our Instagram page has 13,334 followers.
Our Member blog, which features diverse articles about the business of being a commercial photographer, received 10,374 users this month for a +34% increase since last month, when it received 7,545 users, and a +9% boost since last year, when it received 9,208 users.
The three most popular posts on the member blog were
Our Client blog, which features articles written about projects and commissions completed by our member photographers, enjoyed 4,772 users in February for a -3.5% decrease since last month (4,957) and a +9% increase since last year (4,378).
The three most popular posts on the client blog were