Last month, we covered custom reports and how you can specifically cater your data to fit your context. This week, we’re going to get into another customized view called “Dashboards.” Dashboards are collected sections of analytics put together to show all your favorite data in one place. This is great whether you check your data every day or once every few weeks. It’s easy to forget where things may be hidden, so having a customized view that you made and understand is a great reference point.
First, let’s take a quick look at January’s analytics.
We saw a -5.8% drop in users during January, from the 10,322 of December 2020 to 9,725. Similarly, we saw a drop in new users and in sessions, of -5.5% and -3.2%. Mainly negligible changes. Numbers of sessions per user, pageviews, pages per session, average session durationg and bounce rate all improved, respectively: +2.7%, +17.6%, +21.5%, 34.8%, and -6.39% (remember that bounce rates aim at lower numbers). So, while we had less overall traffic this month, the traffic we did get was far more targeted to Wonderful Machine.
Specialty searches, which describe when users search for photographers according to specific specialties, showed a considerable +25% increase on the site during the month of January. Views of photographers profiles also showed an even more dramatic increase — +61.5%! — during the month of January, 5,581 to 9,011 views! Click-throughs, when a user followed the link from a photographer’s profile to their individual site, also increased, albeit more modestly, 2,942 during December to 3,358 times during January. That is a +14.2% increase. Photographer searches (including but not limited to those by specialty) increased by +34% in January. So in brief, photographers (not blog posts) got a lot more traction on our site last month.
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 -11% less traffic since December. Yet this is actually a +8.3% increase in traffic since January of 2020. Similarly, on the member blog — the blog devoted to issues of interest to member photographers (not necessarily clients) — a -4.3% decrease in traffic since January 2020 and a modest increase of +3.4% since December 2020. The technical comment on this is: ¯_(ツ)_/¯
The most popular member blog posts were
The most popular client blog posts were
Okay, let’s get into customizing data displays.
On the left-hand side under “Customization” is “Dashboards”. Navigate there.
Create a new Dashboard by clicking “Create”.
Here, you can use either a starter dashboard or a blank canvas; we’ll be using the blank canvas, but feel free to check out the starter dashboard for the basics. After naming our dashboard and pressing “Create Dashboard,” we get a menu of items that we can add to our dashboard.
This menu allows us to add widgets to the dashboard. Let’s first create a timeline widget to compare new users and all users. On the top row, I selected “Timeline,” as I’d like to see this data over time. You can choose the pie chart if you want to see majorities or bar graphs as well. Then, I’m going add and type in two filters: “Users” and “New Users”. This separates who’s visiting the site for the first time from those who have been on our website before. We like this metric because we can see if our site is making new visitors want to come back, or if we just have a constant flow of new users. Neither is inherently bad, but worth optimizing for if don’t know where you stand.
Go ahead and press “Save,” and presto! Our first widget.
Now, all we have to do to add more is press “Add Widget,” and we can add as many as we want.
I’ve added a few more here as examples and you can add as many as you’d like! You can even get ideas or templates on what to use from a quick Google search.
By clicking on each widget at the top, you can move them around on the screen much like windows on your desktop. Organize things in a way that makes sense to you, so that when you come back and look at your analytics next month, everything is in place and data collection is a cinch.
That’s all for today. What kinds of analytics are your favorites? What analytics would you like to know more about? Next time, we’ll look at user-submitted ideas and try to help out where we can!
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