Being away from the office has caused us minor delay in reporting our analytics for March, but here they are. Has it already been a month of social distancing? With no time to waste wondering, here’s a look into March 2020.
In March, users were down -15% from February, with just 10,131 visitors. In relation to the same period last year, users decreased by -22%. Pageviews were also down -20% from February and -17% from the March 2019. On the other hand, session duration increased +8% from last month, and +29% from the year before. The average session time in March 2020 was 3:05. Since last year, our sessions per user is up +5% and up +1% from last month. This accords with the observation made last month that a sacrifice in quantity was offset by gains in quality — improved session duration and sessions per user signifying quality.
Site events are constituted by click-throughs, which are when users follow the links from a profile to a photographer’s site; profile views, which are views of the profiles of photographers; and photographer searches, which are … [wait for it] searches for photographers! From the previous month, these are down -27%, -25%, and -23%, respectively. From the year before, -34%, -14%, and -24%.
Traffic to our site comes mostly from search engine results, making up 46% of the traffic for March. Last year at the same time this number was 59%. What has increased, then, since last year? Well, everything but email referrals. So, we’re looking at direct traffic (putting the URL into the address bar), referrals (following a link from another site), and social (from social media). These were up 35%, 2%, and a whopping 276%, respectively.
Location-wise, our top three countries were the United States, India, and Canada. Top cities: New York, Los Angeles, London, Chicago, and Irvine, Ca.
Of the traffic we receive from social media sources, more than 65% of that was from Facebook, which actually constituted a near -4% drop from tthe month of February. LinkedIn provided a barely noticeable increase in traffic at 12% (whereas February had provided 11% of our social media traffic). Nearly 10% of our social media traffic was from Instagram and 5% from Pinterest.
Our most popular post on Facebook was our blog feature on Christie Goodwin’s work being put on sale on royal Albert Hall’s online store, garnering 454 likes. The second most was a link to William DeShazer’s work for CNN, with 310 likes, and 14 engagements.
Despite everything, our client blog — the blog that includes spotlights on projects that photographers have recently completed — actually saw at +13% increase in traffic during the last month (over February 2019), although only a more modest +8% increase over March of 2019.
The most popular blog posts on our client blog were
The member blog, which is where we publish articles (like this one) pertinent to the business of being a photographer, saw a considerable drop in traffic, to the tune of -40% (ouch!). In relation last year during the same period the member blog’s traffic dropped by -33%.
The our most popular blog posts on the member blog were