Jetpack
The Digital Stories Canada site uses a free Jetpack plan which includes site stats.
Jetpack integrates visitor statistics into your WordPress site. To access these stats, login to your site. Under Jetpack in the left side menu, choose Site Stats to view daily visitor reports.
The Jetpack interface shows visitor statistics for the previous month and details of yesterday and today’s visits
The bar graph in the screenshot above tells us how many page views took place daily over one month. Referrers could be search engines or social media sites.
The image above shows activities like posts and pages visited yesterday. You can adjust setting on the top left to a view of the week or month. Ten visitors were looking for a Photoshop tutorial that ranks well in Google.
WordPress
If you log into your WordPress account, you’ll get a similar report. This bar chart breaks it down into views and visitors, which is nice. And further down the page, you can see at a glace, that today’s four visitors were from Canada.
Two years later, the number of visitors has increased. During February 2022 (shown below), there were 322 visitors to Digital Stories Canada. The tutorial on Cleaning up photos in Photoshop continues to be popular. The next most common page visit is to the home page, driven primarily by search engine referrals.
A few tutorials back, Google Search Console gave a lower number of visitors per month. This might be the difference between search engine-related visitors and others who follow a link. In either case, the motivation for me is to learn the relative number of visitors, which pages they view and which search terms they used to find Digital Stories Canada.
When pages are promoted on Social Media
In December 2020, I uploaded a new digital story, completed by comic Heather McLean. She shared the link on social media. As a result, many more visitors arrived at the Digital Stories Canada site.
As you can see in the details of Jetpack’s report, 145 visitors watched Toby Sharp’s new digital story on 28 December. 11 visited the home page and 5 viewed the new digital stories from Fall 2020. 89 visitors were referred by Facebook and 3 from Twitter. Storytellers support the site by promoting their own work on social media.
At the end of this analysis, I’ve got a list of keyword phrases that I know are working: digital stories, community digital stories, Mount Pleasant history, How to clean up a scanned document in Photoshop, Photoshop scanned image cleanup, and Photoshop scanned photos cleanup.
Toby Sharp Energy Dragon
In this story, Heather McLean reflects on the race, class and gender dimensions and settler colonial politics of corporatised university research. She also satirises the commodification of self care and new age practices. She is deeply thankful to the land defenders protecting the waters in the unceded traditional lands of Secwepemcúl’ecw where she lives and works.
In the next tutorial, we’ll figure out what else to include on our list of potential keywords. What I’d like to know – are there a lot of people who search for the terms the site is ranking for? Which are the most popular? If digital stories is not that common a term, how could I rephrase it? Try to think like the potential visitors to your site do.
At the same time, I do not want to attract visitors who are looking for something Digital Stories Canada does not offer. This is not a commercial site, it is a site dedicated to artists and research about how we explore new digital technologies.
Did you look at the search terms visitors used to find your site? Did some of the results surprise you? Use what you’ve learned: think about the questions that site visitors are trying to answer when they arrive at your site.
