During the month of June 2022, WonderfulMachine.com saw improvements in most of the key indicators.
If you use Google’s Universal Analytics to collect traffic data for your website, you should know that it’s being replaced with GA4. I have mentioned this in previous analytics reports. At Wonderful Machine, we are slowly shifting our analytics to be based on the GA4, which means that we are starting to use GA4 categories rather than those associated with Universal Analytics.
Rather than simply comparing last month’s indicators with the average for the previous month, we’v started comparing them with the average for the previous year. The reasoning behind this shift is that a year’s average is a better standard for judgment than any previous month, as each year goes through various cycles.
Analytics category | June 2022 | 12-month average | % change |
Users | 9,129 | 9,059 | +0.7 |
Sessions | 13,374 | 12,691 | +5.3 |
Pageviews | 33,542 | 34,016 | -1.4 |
Average session duration | 3:53 | 3:37 | +6.9 |
The first three indicators are quantity indicators and show modest improvement over the previous year’s average. Users counts the number of visitors to the site over the previous month; sessions counts a discrete period when a user opens a series of pages; and pageviews counts the individual pages opened.
The average session duration is a quality indicator, which in relation to the previous 12 months also shows improvement. Unfortunately, this indicator, like the bounce rate (which was 61% for June), is being replaced by the engagement time per user.
The difference between these is that the former is based on all pageviews — including, for example, when a user merely opens a page but doesn’t look at it (as might happen if the page is opened in a tab that the user doesn’t actually look at) — whereas the engagement time per user only counts when a user actually engages with a page, scrolling down the page or clicking on its content. The engagement time per user for June 2022 is 1:51. Note that this is significantly shorter than the average session duration.
Searches for photographers of most types increased during June in relation to the average. Users conducted 5,098 searches, a +1.2% increase over the average of 5,039. Specialty searches actually dropped this month by a hefty -13.8%. Users searched by specialty 1,273 times, whereas the average is 1,476 times.
Location searches are the most popular type of search and were conducted 4,313 times during June. The average number of location searches is 4,025, which means that June was +7.1% above average. Date searches were up by +43.2% in June with 3,679 conducted. The average is 2,569.
Finally, name searches increased as well, but only by +1.7%. Users searched by name 1,629 times; the average was 1,602 times.
Once those photographer searches are performed and a number of photographer records are shown, we count how many times each month a website, Instagram account, LinkedIn profile, and other links are clicked. We have only been tracking these events for several months, each number is compared to the previous month.
Users followed links to photographer websites 4,728 times in June, whereas they did so only 4,560 times in May, an increase of +3.7%. Instagram links were followed 891 times, a +5.8% increase over the 842 of May. LinkedIn profiles were sought 393 times, an increase of +147.2% over May’s middling 159 times.
During June, users viewed the website’s two blogs 11,076 times, which is -8.7% less than the 12,077 we lionized last month.
Wonderful Machine has two different blogs. The first, called Intel, is designed to provide information relevant to the business of being a commercial or editorial photographer. The second, called Published, promotes recent projects (that were either published or used commercially) by our member photographers.
On the Intel blog, the most popular posts were (excepting the EA: Photographer Bio, which is always the most popular article):
On the Published blog, the most popular posts were:
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