Due to some changes in our web ads campaign, traffic surged to the website during the month of April. Quantitatively, a cause for celebration; qualitatively, a moment for reflection.
During the month of March 10,258 users visited WonderfulMachine.com, which is +13.4% increase compared to the 9,049 of February. New users increased by +15.4%, gaining 9,746 as compared to 8,444. Sessions grew to 14,774 from the 13,186 of February, a +12% gain. Pageviews also increased, from 36,454 in February to 39,419 in March — a +8.2% gain.
When compared to the numbers in March of the previous year (2021) the garden is not quite so rosy. Users are down by -10%, sessions by -6.9%, and pageviews by -19.9%.
As usual, the qualitative measures of our traffic are less straightforward. Sessions per user and pageviews per session both declined, by -1.2 and -3.5% respectively. Average session duration, by contrast, improved +4.7%. Then, the bounce rate increased — that is a bad thing, just to keep in mind — albeit only by +1.8%.
Yet in comparison to 2021, the sessions per user improved by +3.5%, pageviews per session decreased by a considerable -14%, the bounce rate improved by falling -5.8%. And then, hold my drink, the average session duration improved by +45.9%! Go ahead and finish my drink, the next round’s on me.
In March 2022 users conducted more searches for photographers on the website. In fact, +12.8% more. They performed 6,149 searches, as opposed to the 5,448 of February. Specialty searches rose by a mere modest +1.7%.
Location searches — the most frequently conducted type of search — went from 3,790 in February to 4,942 in March, which is an immodest +30.4%. Whoa!
Searches by date improved +35.5%, from 2,052 in February to 2,780 in March.
Finally, searches by name — which might be due to photographers searching their own names — rose by +8.6%, going from 2,106 to 2,287.
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.
For example, photographer websites were opened from their records 6,655 times in March 2022. This is an increase of +8.1% over the 6,154 times in February. Instagram was launched 1,489 times, a +29.5% increase over February’s 1,150 times. LinkedIn profiles were viewed 645 times, a +38.7% improvement. Bios, emails links, and BTS were clicked on +58.2, +115.2, and +133% more!
We could have recited the famous “Beware the Ides of March,” as the fate of the website’s articles was down -11.2% in comparison to the previous 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:
On the Published blog, the most popular posts were:
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