The shortest month of the year brought quite a few snowstorms here in the Northeast, but that cold hasn’t slowed down website traffic, which showed remarkable improvements in almost every respect over the month of January. This month we will talk about running web ads and how they can increase your site traffic.
But before we do that, let’s look at February’s traffic report.
In comparison to the month of January, February brought improvements to all of the most important categories. Users increased by +13.7% last month, as did new users, sessions, and pageviews by +11.1%, +15.3%, and +15.5%, respectively. Even average session duration and bounce rate improved, the former by +8% and the latter by -2.3% (remember that a lower bounce rate is always better).
Now were you to compare these numbers to those of yesteryear 2020, back when COVID-19 was supposedly just in China — a news blurb for those of us in the United States — the picture is not so rosy. Users, new users, pageviews, and sessions all went down, by -5.4%, -3.5%, -10.6%, and -1%. Even the bounce rate’s gotten worse since then: it went up +6%.
Specialty searches, which describe when users search for photographers according to specific specialties, showed an impressive +29% increase on the site during the month of February over that of January. Views of photographers profiles also showed an increase, a more modest +12.3%.
Click-throughs, when a user follows the link from a photographer’s profile to their individual site, also increased, from 3,307 during January to 4,229 during February. That is a +27.2% increase. Photographer searches (including but not limited to those by specialty) increased by +30.1% in February.
Wonderful Machine has two different blogs. The number of visitors to our client blog — the blog featuring spotlight articles on recent projects by member photographers — saw -4.2% less traffic since January. Yet this is actually a +8.6% increase in traffic since February of 2020. On the other hand, on the member blog — the blog devoted to issues of interest to member photographers (not necessarily clients) — a +1% increase in traffic since February 2020 and a startling increase of +39.8% since January 2021.
The most popular member blog posts were
The most popular client blog posts were
Need help with your SEO? Email our consultants to learn about the myriad ways he can help improve your website’s functionality.