Stat Reporting

leftquark

Good evening,
I'm a bit confused on the "Stats" that are reported on SmugMug. A couple months ago I remember reading a blog post about how everyone was excited that Stats were getting upgraded and were gunna be a lot more useful. Tonight I decided to try to see whether or not posting my photos to a couple of websites (specifically HDRspotting.com) has boosted traffic to my photos. Unfortunately, I noticed that the Stats reporting on SmugMug still seems to be lacking as it is almost completely uninformative.

My biggest issue (as you'll see in my long rant below) is that I can't seem to find a way to have SmugMug give me my TOTAL stats (it'll only give me a break-down by month). If there's a way to do this, please ignore said rant below and call me a blind idiot.

1) I want to be able to see my most popular photos. Yes, there is a thing on my homepage for "Most Popular Photos" but I'm not sure how that's calculated. Is it based strictly on views? Is it based on thumbs up/thumbs down/star ratings? It would be nice if there was something like Flickr has where you can click on "Popular" and it's broken down by "Interesting"(combination of all the stats), "Views", "Comments", etc.

2) I want to be able to see my TOTAL stats (not just for the month). It appears that SmugMug only shows me monthly stats so it's impossible to figure out how popular my photos are overall. Just because my photos aren't popular this month doesn't mean I don't want to know that they were popular a month ago. Sure, I can scroll back to previous months but I want to be able to see all that data combined.

3) The general stats page breaks down each of the galleries based purely on "Views" (or hits) alone and does not indicate that there is some "data skewing" involved (when trying to figure out if one gallery is more popular than another). For example: galleryA may tell me it had 200 Medium size views for the month; while galleryB may tell me it had 100 Medium size views for the month. What that doesn't say is that galleries that contain more photos generally have more views. For example galleryA may only have 2 views per picture but have 100 pictures. GalleryB may have 4 photos that each got 25 views. To me, I'm more interested in knowing that galleryB was more popular than galleryA.

4) Do these stats include web-crawlers? Looking at my stats for this month it looks like there's 4 times as many views as there are pictures (my pictures go back to 2001). I thought this was a bit strange so I looked into the gallery breakdown. I think every one of my photos has seen at least 1 view. I don't believe I have enough friends that look at all my photos each month for this to be a real person. I assume that it's tracking those creepy spiders too?

5) It may just be me (I hope not though) but I would assume that people care more about how many hits their photos are getting and when they're getting those hits, and that most people don't care what size their photos are viewed at. If I send out a link to my Lightbox, SmugMug automatically determines which size to display it at. I don't care whether or not someone viewed it Small, X-Large, or Original so much as that they looked at it and when they looked at it. I'd like to see trends in when my posts were viewed. Bar graphs showing which sizes were viewed are much less useful (and not to mention requires some brain power (yes, very simple brain power since I got a Masters Degree in Electrical Engineering) to sum up the totals per size to give me a total views number.

Trey Ratcliff (one of the big HDR buff's) started a webiste called HDRSpotting.com, in an attempt to direct traffic towards HDR photographers websites. They keep track of some "Stats" and I was trying to figure out how much traffic my website has gained because of it. I tried to do a comparison but it seems almost useless since I can't get total stats. Also, I don't know if HDRSpotting's "Views" are unique clicks or if it's views on their website (or clicks to my smugmug page) but you would think that a strong majority of people would click to view the photo on the real website rather than on HDRspotting's small view.

I've looked at my top 10 photos on HDRspotting and broken it down as follows:
1) HDRSpotting: 7,120 views; SmugMug: 2 views
2) HDRSpotting: 2,596 views; SmugMug: 33 views
3) HDRSpotting: 1,561 views; SmugMug: 27 views
4) HDRSpotting: 1,480 views; SmugMug: 11 views
5) HDRspotting: 1,063 views; SmugMug: 9 views
6) HDRspotting: 881 views; SmugMug: 13 views
7) HDRSpotting: 868 views; SmugMug: 4 views
8) HDRspotting: 868 views; SmugMug: 9 views
9) HDRspotting: 782 views; SmugMug: 5 views
10) HDRspotting; SmugMug: 1 view

There's a large discrepancy here that I would hope would be evened out if SmugMug showed me total stats. I hope I'm missing something.

Despite my late night rant, I just wanted to mention that I absolutely love SmugMug. Keep up the great work!

Andy

Yeah we have been working on stats, and yeah, it's taken a long time. We have an all-new stats system in final testing now and hope to have it on the site for you to play around with in a beta form in a week or so.

Much of what you are asking for is part of this - stay tuned....

We love Trey Ratcliffe, too!

leftquark

Andy wrote:

Yeah we have been working on stats, and yeah, it's taken a long time. We have an all-new stats system in final testing now and hope to have it on the site for you to play around with in a beta form in a week or so.

Much of what you are asking for is part of this - stay tuned....

We love Trey Ratcliffe, too!

Thanks for the quick reply Andy! Glad to know it's coming soon. I'll be nice and patient