Google Analytics for Photography Websites

Guest Writer - October 10, 2012 | Entrepreneurship, Photographers, Photography Business

Are you measuring your photography website? That question while simple can have a profound impact on how you approach updating and managing your website, and if you are selling your photography the process of sales occurring. Just like you are likely measuring revenue from photographs being purchased, it’s important to know and measure some of the basics of web analytics. Google Analytics is a free software tool for just that purpose, and can help answer the following questions (and much more):

How many people are visiting my website?

How long visitors are staying on my website?

Where are my visitors coming from? I.e. did they land on my page from Facebook, Twitter, or somewhere else?

What is the top photograph, or album that visitors are looking at?

Before going into more depth on the information you can get from Google Analytics, let’s briefly talk about why this is important.

Let’s say for example that you have 200 photographs on your website of all different categories; portraits, weddings, landscapes, birds, and more. You likely have an assumption of which category, and even which set of photographs are the most popular on your website based on your own preferences. Maybe it’s the birds that are your favorite and you have been posting a lot of pictures in that category recently.

By installing Google Analytics, you will not only be able to tell which photograph and category is the most viewed but see all of them in order of views. If it turns out that your gut was correct and birds are your most popular category then you can carry that into your next set of image uploads to the website, which will likely mean additional web traffic and more purchases.

Now let’s take a high level view at the Google Analytics interface, which will give you most of the information you need up front:

As in this standard dashboard view we can see that this website had 5,044 visitors, and 4,480 of those we’re unique individuals. Some of the key metrics that you will see up front and should familiarize yourself with are:

Visits: the total number of visits to your website. This includes unique and repeat visitors.

Unique Visitors: the total number of unduplicated visitors that have come to your website.

Pageviews: the total number of pages viewed. Repeated views of a single page are counted.

Pages / Visit: the average number of pages viewed during a visit to your website.

Avg. Visit Duration: the average time duration of a session.

Bounce Rate: visits in which the person left your site from the entrance page. For example, if a visitor comes to your site at the following URL http://examplsite.com/blog/post-name-1 and then immediately leaves the site it will count in your bounce rate percentage.

New Visits: % New Visits is the percentage of visits that were first-time visits (from people who had never visited your site before).

To find out your most popular content go to ‘Content’, then ‘Overview’ (from the menu on the left) we can see which photographs or pages are driving the most traffic to our site.

Want to drive more traffic to your website? Try including a “related photos” section that also lists relevant images, or if you blog include links to other blog posts so the visitor will stay on your site and potentially view other content.

While we only covered the surface of Google Analytics, the key takeaway here is: by measuring your web traffic through Google Analytics you can gain additional insight into the activities and properties that are most valuable. With this information you can do more of that to increase the key metrics that matters to you without spending needless time.

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