Can you believe January 2020 is over already? Well, neither can the Google Analytics gurus over here at Wonderful Machine. But the end of the month means a new report (in addition to slightly warmer weather, hopefully), and this one will warm you up.
The numbers for January paint a lovely picture of a dramatic increase in users and pageview times as well as a decrease in the bounce rate! Of course, these numbers, as pleasant as they are, are compared to those of December. While December is the month worth waiting for if you operate a consumer retail business, that is not the case for photography production!
We were thrilled to see a 10% jump in users since December, with a 21% jump in our returning users. In comparison to January 2019, however, users and returning users dropped by 23% and 64%, respectively. Ouch. Pageviews increased by 39% from December and only dropped by 16% since last January.
Just to be clear, users refers to individual persons that visited the site, not to the number of pages that the persons viewed, which are collected under the prosaic term pageviews. We had 11,975 users and 48,922 pageviews during January.
For more consistently positive news, in the categories of pageviews per session, session duration, and bounce rate, the numbers increased by 21%, 17%, and 8% between December and January; and 7%, 20%, and .9% since January 2019. To be clear, bounce rates improve when the numbers go down, so the 8% and .85% are actually -8% and -.9%.
Also of note and celebration, profile views — the number of times that the profiles of member photographers were viewed — increased 83% between December and January and .4% since January 2019. 83%! Click-throughs, the times a visitor followed a link on our site to a photographer’s site, increased 45% over last month and decreased 9.5% since last year.
This category encompasses where our traffic comes from. This month, 49% of our traffic came from search engines (e.g. Google), 25% arrived directly (that means someone typed our URL into the browser window), and 13% visited via a social media platform.
Although nearly 50% of our traffic arrived from Google, that does not mean that individuals searched “photography production company” or “photographer directory.” Most people use the location bar of their browser to find URLs rather than typing them in. In fact, at least 40% of that 50% (or 20% of all traffic, for you math geeks out there) arrived at our site using precisely that method.
That’s fine with us because Wonderful Machine draws most of its users — the clients that go on to hire you, the photographer — from agencies and publications and brands that already know who we are and the directory of excellent photographers that we maintain.
Those users hailed from the United States (66.4%), India (5%), and the United Kingdom (4.5%), among other nations; and resided in New York (6.4%), Los Angeles (2.5%), and London (2%), among other wonderful (ahem) metropolises.
As for that social media, we saw a 32% increase in users coming from Facebook since December and a 227% increase since last year. Thanks, Cliff (our social media guru)! Similar increases were seen from Instagram, LinkedIn, and Pinterest (it’s not just for homemakers!).
Our most popular Facebook post, “Matt Trappe Shoots the Nike Cross Nationals for Runner’s World,” reached 1380 persons and gained 146 reactions, comments, and shares. The second most popular was “Jessica Attie Hosts Another Sold out Show at Austin’s Caffe Medici,” which reached 737 persons and gained 46 reactions, comments, and shares.
Both our client and member blogs saw considerable gains in traffic since December. The client blog received 9% more users, and the member blog increased 15% in users. FYI, the client blog designates the blog that is aimed at the brands, publications, and agencies that will hire you, the photographer. This blog contains 4-5 photographer spotlight posts weekly written by our very talented Varun Raghupathi.
The member blog publishes content — like this very post — that tells you what we are doing on your behalf as well as answers questions about what our specialties mean, how to create business cards, how to write a photographer bio (by far our most trafficked blog post), and what shoot productions we’ve handled recently, etc. In other words, things pertinent to the business that is commercial photography.
The most popular Member Blog articles:
The most popular Client Blog articles: