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As the economy has suffered, so have the fortunes of Wonderful Machine.com’s traffic indicators, except where site events — photographer searches, click-throughs, and specialty searches — are concerned. The latter have shown modest but substantial improvements.
Wonderful Machine users declined by -9.2% during the month of June, from 10,878 in May to 9,873. New users dropped by -9.5%, and returning users were reduced by -12.5 between the months of May and June. Those drops are unsurprisingly lower in relation to June of 2019 (before this whole COVID thing), -12, -12, and -24% reductions, repectively. The site also observed a diminuation of the number of pageviews, sessions, and sessions per user: -9.3, -12, and -2.7%.
However, pageviews per session (2.56), average session duration (2:09 minutes), and the bounce rate (65.9%) all improved, by +2.6, +4.7, and -5.1% (remember that a decreasing bounce rate is good) respectively. Take that Debbie Downer!
Users clicked-through 2,895 times during the month of June. This category describes when users follow the links from member photographers’ profiles to their respective websites. That number is up by +5% since May of 2020 but down -29% since June 2019. Users searched photographers according to specialties 6,001 times during June, which constitutes an increase of +13% over May 2020 and a decrease of -29% over June 2019 respectively. Profile views (6,592) dropped by -18% since May and -24% since June 2019. Photographer searches (3,001) increased by +21.5% since May and decreased by -28% since June 2019.
So in relation to last year, back before COVID and the corresponding effects to the economy, the numbers are disappointing, but in relation to May and the beginning of this new economic outlook these numbers are genuinely hopeful.
The percentage of users that arrived at WonderfulMachine.com from search engines (51.4%) decreased by -14% since June 2019, and the percentage of users arriving directly to the site (21.6%) decreased by -25 percent. Referrals (7.1%) dropped by -38% over last year, but traffic from social media (10.7%) and from our email campaigns (6.4%), like our Creative in Place initiative, increased by +84 and +29%, respectively, over last year.
Like in previous months, the majority of our users (57%) were located in the United States during the month of May, followed by India and Canada (12 and 4.6%, respectively). The five major metropolitan areas from which our users hailed were New York City, New York; Los Angeles, California; London, United Kingdom; Chicago, Illinois; and Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.
Wonderful Machine maintains a vibrant presence on at least six different forms of social media including Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, Pinterest, Twitter, and YouTube. Facebook has consistently directed the lion’s share of traffic (of social media sources) to our site (60.3%). This may sound strange to you since Instagram is the social media platform most used by industry professionals. But keep in mind that there are many, many more users on Facebook in comparison to those on Instagram. This is the reason why we encourage all photographers to create a Facebook page for their businesses.
On Facebook we have nearly seven thousand followers (6,917). Our daily posts garnered similar attention to previous months (unfortunately Facebook’s analytics are quite limited in relation to those of Google Analytics, for example). The most popular post promoted Dimitri Mais’ Coney Island project. The second most popular post advertised our Zoom Open House with member photographer John Fulton, ViaSat art director Justin Patrick, and producer Karin Fittante.
Our Instagram handle had 14,024 followers during the month of May, which was a most increase over May (6.7%). John David Pittman‘s image from June 9th of a building in reflection had 2,150 impressions, being our most popular image of June; Leila Ashtari‘s lovely green culinary shot from June 11th was the second most popular with 2,015 impressions.
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 — decreased by -28% since May but increased by +47% between this year and last. As well, our member blog — the blog devoted to issues of interest to member photographers (not necessarily clients) — saw a slight decline of -4.5% since May and -20% since June 2019.
The most popular member blog posts were
The most popular client blog posts were
Check back next month for more hard-hitting analyses of the economy translated into web analytics data!