Social Media Marketing for Photographers // Photography + Community

Over the next couple of weeks, I’ll be covering a bit about statistics… the results of measuring traffic to a blog or website. Before we get into specifics of what the numbers mean (or even what software should be used to measure them), let’s start at the beginning and define a goal.

Generally having more visitors to one’s blog or website is good, but beyond that it’s hard to dive into statistics without knowing the purpose of the site. Are you using your website primarily to gain new clients? If so, you’ll want to make sure that folks can view your work, find your contact information, and take the next step to obtaining your services.

Are you using your site primarily as a showcase of your work? In that case, driving folks to the contact page might not be as important, but rather you’ll be concerned with whether or not visitors are reaching all areas of your site and spending a decent length of time before browsing away.

Are you using your site to post articles that will provide information for folks about a particular subject? You’ll probably end up being concerned about how well your site is doing with long term search engine traffic for those topics.

Think a bit about the main purpose of your site… what’s your goal?. Later this week we’ll continue our look at stats and analytics by comparing a few popular software packages.

Photo by DRB62, used under Creative Commons licensing

Tagged as:
analytics,
stats,
traffic,
webstats

It’s time for another installment of our series on web statistics and what they can mean to a photographer. We talked about about web statistics goals, looked at web statistics software, and asked what hits, bounce rates, and unique visitors mean. Today we’re going to look at referrers, exit pages, and outbound links.

Referrers

Referrers (sometimes misspelled referers, to match a misspelling in the actual web specification) are the web pages that are driving traffic to your website. When a visitor arrives on your site because they clicked a link on another site, the URL of that other site is recorded by your stats software as the referrer. If someone does a Google search and clicks on your site in the results, you’ll see google.com in your referrers list. If they clicked a link on your Flickr profile to get to your site, you’ll see flickr.com as the referrer.

Referrers are important for a couple of reasons. First, when you see a referrer you don’t recognize, it probably means that someone linked to your site, and it’s worth checking out the page. The other use for referrers is to know (over a time period) where most of your traffic is coming from. If you’re spending a lot of time on a particular forum in order to drive traffic to your site but find that it has only sent you three hits in a month, you might rethink that strategy.

Exit Pages

Exit pages are the opposite of entrance (landing) pages. Exit pages indicate where a visitor was on your site immediately before they left. It can be interesting to know where people are leaving your site from. Sometimes you might want to look at the top exit pages and figure out why they’re driving people away.

Outbound Links

If your analytics program can track specific outbound links, not only will you know which page they were on, but you’ll be able to know precisely which link they’re clicking.

Wrapping it Up

With the various web statistics blog posts thus far, we’ve talked about quite a few metrics and what they mean. Next week, we’ll talk about one more specific statistic (search terms) and then start bringing it all together to increase traffic, leads, and readership.

Photo by AMagill, used under Creative Commons licensing

Tagged as:
analytics,
exit pages,
outbound links,
referrers,
webstats

We previously talked about understanding goals before worrying about web statistics. Let’s talk about another bit of infrastructure before we dive into numbers next week. If you’re going to record statistics for your website or blog, you’ll need some sort of software. All web servers record basic information about who is visiting your site such as their IP address and web browser, but to track more interesting information you’ll need some sort of advanced stats software. There are quite a few players in the market but today we’ll look at a few of the most popular.

Google Analytics is the most popular free statistics package. You’ll install a bit of javascript into your website (there are plugins for popular systems such as WordPress), and Google will start tracking all sorts of information about who is visiting your site, which pages they’re visiting, how they got there, and how long they’re hanging around. The upside to Google Analytics is that it’s free and offers a lot of information, the downside is that it can require some customization to find the useful information on their dashboard and it can’t be extended.

Woopra is a relatively new player in the game, offering real-time web tracking and analysis. Woopra offers a very rich visual experience to see your web traffic by using a desktop client that runs on your computer (Windows, Mac, or Linux). There’s also a more basic view available on the Woopra website. Like Google Analytics, Woopra is free, and is tightly integrated with WordPress. Woopra looks great, but my observations have been that they’re still working out some bugs in their relatively new product.

My statistics program of choice for this site and my Portland event photography site is Mint. Unlike Google Analytics and Woopra, Mint is commercial software that costs $30 per site. Mint is focused on offering stats with a “what’s happening recently” focus, and slicing and dicing your visitor data in any number of ways. The best part about Mint is that it has an active developer community in which anyone can write new modules (called “Pepper”) which add new functionality to the system. The core Mint software tracks the basics, but the various Pepper can track things like bounce rate, trends over time, and offer graphical displays instead of Mint’s default table-based data presentation. The only downsides to Mint are that it’s not as widely integrated with other systems as Google Analytics, and that it’s not free (although if you’re serious about your website or blog, a one-time $30 fee is hardly a big expense).

Our next look at stats will start by looking at some of the basic numbers that should matter to a photographer who is publishing on the web.

Photo by kevinzhengli, used under Creative Commons licensing

Tagged as:
google analytics,
haveamint,
mint,
stats,
webstats,
woopra

Over the past month or so, I’ve posted several articles related to web statistics and what they mean. Let’s take a look at an important referrer-related bit of information: inbound search links. These identify the terms that visitors are putting into search engines and then finding your site. For example, if one searches for Portland wedding photography, gets a page of search results and then clicks on a link to Gabriel Boone Photography, the web statistics for the Gabriel Boone Photography site will note that someone arrived via a search for Portland wedding photography.

Pay attention to the search terms that people are using to find your site. Some of them might be expected, but odds are that you’ll find some search terms that might be outside of what you planned. That’s not a bad thing; it can actually be an eye-opener to some topics that you should address more frequently or in more detail.

In the opposite scenario, you might find a lack of referrers coming from search terms that you’re expecting. If you focus on senior pictures in Seattle, ideally your site will be listed when people search for senior pictures Seattle. If it’s not, that’s when you’ll want to look at doing a bit of search engine optimization (SEO). A good place to start might be my short article on SEO and keywords, or view all posts here tagged as SEO-related.

We’ve tied together web statistics and SEO. They are two separate areas that a web publisher should address. Web statistics give a view into your site’s current performance and popularity, while SEO can help you gain more traffic from people who are performing web searches.

Next week, we’ll look at a few more advanced SEO topics that go beyond simple keywords and links.

Photo by David Trowbridge, used under Creative Commons licensing

These other posts might be of interest to you:

1. Web Statistics: Referrers, Exit Pages, and Outbound Links
2. Goals Before Numbers
3. Posting Video Online? A Quick Tip for Search Optimization

Tagged as:
referrers,
seo,
webstats

We talked a bit about web statistics goals and looked at web statistics software, so let’s start looking at some statistics themselves. As mentioned in previous posts, what the statistics will mean depends on the purpose of your website. Looking at things from a photography perspective, today we’ll talk about hits, entry pages, and bounce rate.

Hits (and Uniques)

Hits is a term used to describe each time a visitor loads a page on a website. When a visitor loads your homepage, that’s a hit. If he then navigates to your gallery page, that’s another hit. The larger the number of hits, the more pages on your website that are being loaded. Because one visitor could equal many hits, there’s a qualifying term that’s used: unique hits (or unique visitors). That measures distinct visits, so that one person who happened to peruse 28 of your pages would only be recorded as one unique visitor.

Hits are good, since in general you’ll want your website to have as much traffic as possible, but as a standalone measure they aren’t that important. Your website’s number of hits should trend upward over time, but the exact number isn’t really meaningful.

Entry Pages

Entry pages are fairly straightforward: what pages are folks using to enter (arrive at) your website? Are most of your visitors starting out on your homepage? Are they landing on a gallery or contact page as the beginning of their time on your site? Are they coming in via your blog?

Entry pages matter because it’s important that your site’s visitors can find their way around once they get to your site. You probably designed your site such that navigation is very obvious from the homepage, but what if people arrive via your blog? What if you have a very popular sub-page and a bunch of traffic arrives starting there? Can people find their way to other sections of your site? How do you know if your entry pages might need some help? That leads us to the next statistic for the day…

Bounce Rate

The bounce rate is the percentage of visitors who arrive on your site and then leave without visiting any other pages. Generally the goal is to have visitors spend some time on your website, so you’ll want a bounce rate percentage that is fairly low. It’s hard to peg a goal for a bounce rate that applies to all sites; depending on the purpose of your site (and how folks usually arrive), varying levels of bounce rate are acceptable. I’ve found that on websites with most visitors arriving via the blog, relatively high bounce rates are common (75%+), but on sites that are more focused on general photography and photographer information (such as my site for Portland event photography), bounce rates will be lower because clients and leads will arrive on the site and explore a bit (before hopefully ending up on my contact page to continue with their inquiry).

Hits, unique visitors, entry page awareness, and bounce rate are a good start for tracking general statistics for your website. In our next installment we’ll talk about referrers, exit pages, and conversion.

Photo by markhillary, used under Creative Commons licensing

Tagged as:
bounce rate,
entry pages,
hits,
statistics,
webstats