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This month’s analytics report will introduce Google Analytics’ Behavior report. Behavior shows what your users are doing and what pages they are landing on and visiting. You may have users finding your work via a certain photograph or from a blog post that had more virality (yeah, I just coined that!) than the rest of your posts. Whatever may be driving that traffic, it’s important to understand how your users are acting.
But first, the numbers for Wonderful Machine’s site during the month of November (unless you can’t wait to talk about Behavior!).
Wonderful Machine users increased by +.8% during the month of November, from 10,920 in October to 11,012. Both new users increased by a modest +1.2% between October and November, whereas returning users fell by -3%. The site also observed sizeable decreases in the number of pageviews, sessions, sessions per user, pageviews per session, session duration, and even the bounce rate: -22.8%, -4.9%, -5.7%, -18.8%, -23.7%, and +12.21 (remember that a bigger bounce is worse), respectively.
Uncle!
Users clicked-through 3,175 times during the month of November. This category describes when users follow the links from member photographers’ profiles to their respective websites. That number is down by -15.3% since October. Users searched photographers according to specialties 6,082 times during November, which constitutes a decrease of -23.8% over October 2020. Profile views (6,150) fell by -38.8% since October and fell by -34.9.2% since November 2019. Photographer searches (2,768) decreased by -32.0% since October 2020 by -28.4% since November 2019.
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 — increased by +24.5% since last month. The member blog — the blog devoted to issues of interest to member photographers (not necessarily clients) — saw a decrease of -18.7% since October.
The most popular member blog posts were
The most popular client blog posts were
Okay, now that we’ve reviewed the numbers, let’s take a look at
First, I navigate to Behavior (1) and then Behavior Flow (2). Then I set the time period to that of November (3). We can set this to any period of time but considering this is the monthly report, we will just focus on the last 30 days.
This view shows us where our users landed on when they arrived. This is nearly as important as traffic. Instead of seeing where they came from, which is an external URL, we now see an internal URL (i.e., from our own site). Looking at Wonderful Machine’s data we can see that most of the users landed on the home page. After that, they landed on several different blog posts and then the photographer search page. The large chunk at the bottom is a random set of pages that is accumulated with the rest of the traffic for the month.
If I was to look at a member photographer’s data, and saw that a blog post was extremely popular, or perhaps even any page, I would highly suggest optimizing that page. It’s important to make use of every opportunity. It depends on the context, but that might be making sure all images are properly sized and properly formatted. It may be relocating a video that doesn’t belong there that makes the page load very slowly. It may be adding a call to action at the bottom of the page to entice users to give an email address or sell a product or service.
An excellent use of a landing page is to create it with a funnel in mind. You want to keep your users on your site, and the best way to do so is with a funnel. Bring them in for more content and keep their interest with an offer. There are many different ideas to do this, but the big picture is optimizing landing pages for maximum efficacy on each user.
Moving forward we can look at every single page. Not just where they land, but every single page they visit. For people new to Google Analytics this may be very interesting to you. Sometimes you may think your content is brilliant, but your users think otherwise. Or maybe that the page link is broken but you have 0 page views. Sometimes you will have content that has impressive “Average Time on Page” (how long the user has stayed on that page). This can help determine what the users are truly interested in.
We can view this information by going to “Site Content” and then “All Pages.”
Let’s take a look at the “Content Drilldown.” We can see that our homepage has the most views. This usually means the content is being indexed well by Google and most people are finding us from there. The next biggest are the most popular blog posts and pages this month. Follow on what we talked about before, we have optimized our photographer bio page due to the amount of traffic that it gets.
If you have suggestions for the focus for next month’s Analytics report, let us know. Otherwise, we will delve into “Custom Reports” so that you can quickly see the data you seek in a single report!
If you found something helpful here or have a question, feel free to reach out to us at [email protected].