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April was a month of exciting improvements for us here at Wonderful Machine—the weather got warmer, we signed the lease on a new office space (more on that soon!), and, as you know, we launched our brand new website on April 1st. With the new site came lots of changes, one of which is a new and improved way of monitoring our analytics.
Because our search and blog were two separate sites before, and we had to measure their traffic separately, we now realize that the incoming traffic that we used to report was probably somewhat inflated since we were counting visitors once when they arrived at our blog (for example), and then again when they clicked on the search part of the site. Now that our blog is integrated with the rest of our website, we’ll have a more accurate account of the number of actual visits (called Sessions in Google Analytics) and unique visitors (called Users in Google Analytics).
Now, onto the actual numbers! The main things we’re interested in tracking are incoming visitors to our site (Sessions and Users) and outgoing traffic to our photographers. Last month, our site saw 32,121 sessions from 22,977 unique users. In March, before launch, we recorded 31,592 sessions from 20,596 users between our search site and blog. Given the way we were previously measuring the traffic, we estimate that we actually had about 1/3 more actual sessions in April than in March (since we are no longer counting some sessions twice). This increase is likely due to our marketing efforts during launch, the improved functionality of the new site and the fact that our website and search are now responsive and optimized for use on all mobile devices.
Our analytics overview for April.
We had a total of 10,999 outgoing clicks to our photographers during the month of April. Below you can see the photographers that got the most clicks for that month. Salt Lake City-based photographer Cam McLeod led the way with 51, followed closely by Jody Horton, Alberto Oviedo, Anya Chibis and Alastair Philip Wiper.
Photographers receiving the most clicks in April.
In the past few weeks, we’ve had several concerned members contact us because their analytics were showing zero traffic from WM since the new launch. Not to worry! The traffic was there; it just wasn’t showing up in the analytics. Here’s an explanation for that disparity:
As part of the new website development, we made our site more secure by switching from HTTP to HTTPS. We made this switch for a few reasons—to boost client confidence in the reliability of our site, to add security in anticipation of enhancements we may make to the site later, and to boost our ranking with search engines like Google. By boosting our ranking, we’re making our site easier to find and, by extension, making it easier to find our photographers as well. However, one of the side effects of switching to HTTPS that we didn’t anticipate was that our photographers weren’t seeing the traffic they were getting from us. We discovered that this was the result of a security measure that comes with HTTPS, which basically dictates that HTTP sites (non-secure) can’t see the traffic they’re getting from secure sites (HTTPS). However, since then we’ve worked some web magic to allow our members to see the traffic we’re sending them, so things should be back to normal now on that front.
You may also notice that in April, despite the heavier amount of overall traffic, there are fewer outgoing clicks to our photographers’ sites. During the 12 months preceding our launch, we averaged about 15,563 outgoing clicks/per month to our photographers. This month, we totaled 10,999. We can likely attribute the drop in clicks to a few factors:
While the drop in referrals is not necessarily a bad thing, since the visitors our photographers are receiving are more deliberate and likely have a lower bounce rate, we are continuing to improve the site with our developers at Sparkbox. We’ve started to link directly out to photographer sites in our blog posts and have built-in measures to track this as part of our overall referral traffic. On photographer profiles, we’re also now linking the name and headshot of each of our photographers to his/her site to encourage more outgoing clicks.
Last month, our newly designed blog had 18,637 pageviews:
The top ten viewed pages within the blog section of our site in April.
Below are the top five most popular photographer news blog posts:
Thanks for your patience as we work through these growing pains and as we learn more about analytics. Once the dust settles on the new site (and on our new office space), we’re going to be working with an SEO specialist to make sure we’re doing everything we can to generate traffic to our site and to our member photographers.
Questions about interpreting your analytics? Reach out and let us help