Stats don't add up I keep track of my stats daily and here's an example where they just don't add up. I have a new gallery that I created on 3/20/10 and didn't make it public until 3/21/10. Every day I get a Google Analytics report for the previous day and then I go to the Smugmug New Stats to get info for the same period. I look at the Popularity tab and click on Yesterday. Here's what I got:
3/20/10 10 hits (It wasn't even public until 3/21 and I do have it set up so that it shouldn't be counting hits when I look at the gallery)
3/21/10 449 hits
3/22/10 536 hits
3/23/10 152 hits
3/24/10 37 hits (so far today, I used the TODAY button for this one)
That gives a total of 1184 hits. But, when I click on Last Seven Days it says I have 601 hits. Not even close!!
Also, if want to go back a few days and see the Popularity stats for a single day I used to be able to set beginning and ending dates to the same date and see stats for that day. Now, suppose I have been looking at the Last Seven Days stats and then I reset the date to get stats for a single day it doesn't change anything, I am still looking at the stats for the last seven days.
I haven't gotten used to it yet, but I did notice something just now that seemed wrong. I selected a gallery and today only and clicked on popular. It took a while to load. But when it finally appeared, it had loaded thumbs of all the pics in the gallery, despite the fact that the overwhelming majority had zero hits. Waste of computer resources and my time, IMO. Just load the ones that have activity.
Old Version of Stats
The old version of stats has disappeared. I found the old version much easier to check which galleries and photos were being viewed the most. Are we going to see the old version again or our we stuck with the new one. Old one was much simpler to navigate.
I think something similar has been asked, but I didn't see an answer.
I see a spike in views on a specific date but I don't see a way to see what is causing the spike without going through each gallery or even each photo.
I see a spike in views on a specific date but I don't see a way to see what is causing the spike without going through each gallery or even each photo.
The ancient stats can’t compete with the new at all. At the other hand, the quick overview over all galleries is missing in the new stats – a very helpful feature to quickly discover spikes in traffic.
I agree - I'm all for constructive change - but I could use the old Stats in ways that are no longer possible with the new. First, I really liked using the old Stats page as a quick & easy way to see all my galleries visually in one place. They were all there, whether they were public, hidden, etc. 2nd, you could click the gallery name links and jump instantly to any gallery. If the old Stats are gone for good, wondering if there might be a way to have a page that does this?
The old version of stats has disappeared. I found the old version much easier to check which galleries and photos were being viewed the most. Are we going to see the old version again or our we stuck with the new one. Old one was much simpler to navigate.
I agree. I liked the old stats better. Perhaps I'm afraid of change and am just unfamiliar with the new version. Perhaps I'll grow to like the new version with time.
But I loved being able to view each gallery with a bar graph and total number of hits per gallery all on one page. I would like an option to view the old version and the new one, but it's probably too much trouble/bandwidth to have both.
I also loved the old stats, much easier to see what galleries had the most views, what size photos people were viewing, and what photos they were viewing. It is much more complicated now, and short of manually selecting the start and end of the month, I can't seem to figure out how to view stats for only that month..
I must admit I was rather hoping we would get to have both systems as I too find the new method overcomplicated when I just want a quick glance at what has changed sinced yesterday. With the bar graphs is was easy and obvious. Now I doubt I'll use the stats at all.
Why can't we have both systems or at least incorporate the old into the new with a one page option?
The old system was virtually hopeless for people with large #s of galleries.
I'm not sure why that would be the case but I would guess that most people here don't have large numbers of galleries. In any case it should be easy to have both.
I'm not sure why that would be the case but I would guess that most people here don't have large numbers of galleries. In any case it should be easy to have both.
Two accounts. 150 galleries in one account, 525 galleries in the other. While I still have some issues with the new stats, the old stats were completely useless to me due to the number of galleries.
I have many hundreds of Galleries and some of them have same name .... like "Overview" and "Summer Walk". These with same name are placed in different Catergories and/or sub-Categories.
In new stats I use Popularity. How do I see in which Category and sub-Category a specific "Overview" Gallery is located?
Regards, Harald
==================
My focus is on digitizing memories
I'm not sure if it could be done with the old stats, but I'm just trying to find out if I can pin point the Gallery, Category, or photo that causes a sudden jump on the number views on the Totals page with out searching through each category or photo.
Two accounts. 150 galleries in one account, 525 galleries in the other. While I still have some issues with the new stats, the old stats were completely useless to me due to the number of galleries.
The new stats are certainly better for really large numbers of galleries. But since there are others like myself who used the old stats in a particular way that was valuable to their workflow, would it be such a big problem to just continue to have both, or somehow combine them so the original view is still available?
Stat inaccuracies and 2 requests
New stats are very cool- apologies in advance if these issues are already known- there's some chatter about stat inaccuracies but I haven't seen a response yet- maybe these issues have already been fixed not that stat's are out of beta?
Stat inaccuracies- I'd see large numbers of views to new shots I added to galleries- even if they were hidden/buried/private. Assume these can't be real humans- so either web crawlers, or bugs in tracking?
Requests:
1) Total views- any way to switch the DEFAULT table layout sort so today's data is at the top, not the bottom? More interested in today's views than 30 days ago... (I know I can switch this with a click, but I imagine but people have the same preference)
2) New "Popularity" view?
A much larger request... but I would LOVE the ability to see each photo that has been viewed on a specific day- i.e. today- without having to dive into a particular gallery. Right now when I click on "Popularity" and "Today only" I can see a numerical list of each gallery and the number of views... but not the images viewed unless I dive into each gallery.
So the request would be for a "Today's Views" tab that shows a thumbnail of each image, regardless of gallery, and the number of views, sorted by most viewed at top, and only extending to images that had direct views.
That way I could see visually how popular images were getting hits, regardless of which gallery they reside in. Images that received no hits would not be listed.
Hey I can dream, right?
Big props in advance- SmugMug already rocks... and it gets better all the time
Trust your initial action
Like others I have been using the old and beta stats since the beta was first made available. Looking at the old first, then beta.
When the old data was taken down, I was taken right to the new Total Views screen. My first, instinctual action was to click on today's date. Nothing. Clicked on today's number of photos. Nothing. Clicked on today's data point on the graph. Nothing. I found myself looking for information about what happened today and it wasn't there.
Frustration mounting, I looked for an intuitive way to see all of today's action in one place and found the same problem in Gallery Trends. Clicked on the same places where I expected a link, but nothing. Gallery Details shows comparative view data over time. Photo Trends shows daily action, but only after a laborious process of selecting a gallery and individual photo - regardless of how many galleries one has, this takes way too much time to spot what's generating viewer action and the format is less than ideal. Oddly and unlike the other tabs, Popularity didn't provide the ability to select a gallery. It just showed data for a gallery previously selected by the Gallery Trends & Details tabs (and oddly, not a prior selection in the Photo Trends tab).
A lot of commenters have raised the issue of easily seeing what attracted viewer's attention day by day. I'm not sure any one of the great folks from SmugMug has responded to this particular topic - regardless of whether they can or will add back this capability.
Would be useful if the Total Views pages provided the ability to see which photos were viewed on a given day or at least the latest day. Same for the Gallery Trends tab.
Guess I didn't notice the absence of this capability during the beta comment period because I used the old charts for that purpose. Now I clearly miss it, vainly clicking on dead spots, hoping a missing link has come alive.
Cumulative Total?
Apologies for any duplication but I haven't had time to dig into this thread. Following is what I sent to Help@SmugMug earlier, to which they responded that I should post my suggestion/request here:
"Is there a cumulative total for all galleries (total views) shown somewhere - perhaps right before my eyes - that I can't find? If not, please include one for much easier tracking of overall changes rather than our adding up all of the days manually. Same request for each stat tab. The old stats clearly showed the total for the month for each gallery and all galleries. I like the new stats, thanks, but would like that one stat back."
Allen, Sorry about that. We forget that there is sometimes an easier way to do things. Check the stats tab in your control panel beside the Statistics link. There is a total there. But, because that is not actually in the stats, this is still a great place to discuss what you want and how it should work. I hope that helps.
Registering my complaint
I emailed SmugMug about the new statistics change and they suggested my thoughts hear. Okay, so here goes:
"I do not like it [statistics] as well as the old one. It may be more detailed, which is fine, but I (really) miss being able to get an overview of the number of hits each gallery was getting. Now, I have to look up each gallery individually, and that is just too cumbersome. Can we have the old statistics option back? Thanks."
i'm still confused on this new stats feature. Do not know what each tabs means.
I have a certain day that i got higher than normal views, how do i go about checking where the traffic is from, and to which specific gallery/image?
thanks
We're working on getting referrer stats (where the hits are coming from). As far as which specific gallery/image, just change the stats to a specific day or time period and hit the popularity tab. Then you can go into the specific gallery details to find out which image(s) are the culprits.
New statistics
I am finding the new stats much slower (the word loading is on the screen a lot) and somewhat less useful than the old ones. The great virtue of the old system was that it was easy to see quickly how different galleries were doing and then see what was happening in galleries of interest.
Under popularity, it would be nice if the photographs could be listed in order of posting rather than popularity. Sometimes I am interested in how new pictures are doing.
Photo trends displays a list of pictures with files names. You can click on a photo to see its stats. It would be nice if it showed the number of times a pictures was viewed as well besides the file names.
I know that stats has been a difficult issue and that a lot of time has been spent on coming up with a workable system. However, I think it needs a few more features and I hope it can be speeded up. Otherwise it is very painful to use.
Can't seem to find the total no. of hits for the entire site anymore, just daily numbers but no totals.
Under Gallery Details, description "small, med, Large, X Large, original, etc" is listed horizontally only at the top, it's a bit confusing as you scroll down to see how many of hits were of what size.
Agree that the drop down menus do not work well as posted above.
Can't seem to find the total no. of hits for the entire site anymore, just daily numbers but no totals.
Under Gallery Details, description "small, med, Large, X Large, original, etc" is listed horizontally only at the top, it's a bit confusing as you scroll down to see how many of hits were of what size.
Agree that the drop down menus do not work well as posted above.
You guys... don't waste your time with smug stats!
Since I first tried the stats out on smugmug, I decided to switch over to google analytics. You'd be hard pressed to find a better way of tracking the activity on your photos. Here's a few reasons why...
Google Analytics shows you only actual traffic on your smugmug account. Images that are linked into and viewed on a blog elsewhere aren't counted. I've always disliked how my stats numbers in smugmug are inflated because of the traffic on my wordpress blog.
Not only do you see which photos and galleries are getting the most traffic for any given time period, but you can also see where they came from, whether it be from a referring website, a search engine, or directly.
For search engine traffic, you can see what keywords were used that landed users onto your smugmug pages.
You can see how long users browse, where they go in your pages, and even information about the users (OS, screen resolution, geographic region, ISP)
This is even something that smugmug encourages you to do. They've posted info on how to go about doing this and best of all it's free.
... and once you get your feet wet with it, there are even advanced techniques in the analytics help files that show you how to go about excluding your own traffic on smugmug.
It's not likely that smug stats will ever compare to what you get with google analytics. Urchin Software created the original system, and they used to sell it as a subscription based service for several hundred per month. Google bought them out back in 2005, integrated it into their own systems, made improvements to it, and now gives it away for free. Why not use it?
Comments
3/20/10 10 hits (It wasn't even public until 3/21 and I do have it set up so that it shouldn't be counting hits when I look at the gallery)
3/21/10 449 hits
3/22/10 536 hits
3/23/10 152 hits
3/24/10 37 hits (so far today, I used the TODAY button for this one)
That gives a total of 1184 hits. But, when I click on Last Seven Days it says I have 601 hits. Not even close!!
Also, if want to go back a few days and see the Popularity stats for a single day I used to be able to set beginning and ending dates to the same date and see stats for that day. Now, suppose I have been looking at the Last Seven Days stats and then I reset the date to get stats for a single day it doesn't change anything, I am still looking at the stats for the last seven days.
I haven't gotten used to it yet, but I did notice something just now that seemed wrong. I selected a gallery and today only and clicked on popular. It took a while to load. But when it finally appeared, it had loaded thumbs of all the pics in the gallery, despite the fact that the overwhelming majority had zero hits. Waste of computer resources and my time, IMO. Just load the ones that have activity.
Bugs
Spiders
Flowers
Portfolio • Workshops • Facebook • Twitter
The old version of stats has disappeared. I found the old version much easier to check which galleries and photos were being viewed the most. Are we going to see the old version again or our we stuck with the new one. Old one was much simpler to navigate.
I see a spike in views on a specific date but I don't see a way to see what is causing the spike without going through each gallery or even each photo.
Am I missing something?
http://ebinfl.smugmug.com/
However, there’s a downside and a number of members have asked similar questions:
The ancient stats can’t compete with the new at all. At the other hand, the quick overview over all galleries is missing in the new stats – a very helpful feature to quickly discover spikes in traffic.
Any idea when you’ll add this to the new stats?
Thx Nicolas
But I loved being able to view each gallery with a bar graph and total number of hits per gallery all on one page. I would like an option to view the old version and the new one, but it's probably too much trouble/bandwidth to have both.
Why can't we have both systems or at least incorporate the old into the new with a one page option?
I'm not sure why that would be the case but I would guess that most people here don't have large numbers of galleries. In any case it should be easy to have both.
Homepage • Popular
JFriend's javascript customizations • Secrets for getting fast answers on Dgrin
Always include a link to your site when posting a question
I have many hundreds of Galleries and some of them have same name .... like "Overview" and "Summer Walk". These with same name are placed in different Catergories and/or sub-Categories.
In new stats I use Popularity. How do I see in which Category and sub-Category a specific "Overview" Gallery is located?
Regards, Harald
My focus is on digitizing memories
Is there a way to do this?
http://ebinfl.smugmug.com/
The new stats are certainly better for really large numbers of galleries. But since there are others like myself who used the old stats in a particular way that was valuable to their workflow, would it be such a big problem to just continue to have both, or somehow combine them so the original view is still available?
New stats are very cool- apologies in advance if these issues are already known- there's some chatter about stat inaccuracies but I haven't seen a response yet- maybe these issues have already been fixed not that stat's are out of beta?
Stat inaccuracies- I'd see large numbers of views to new shots I added to galleries- even if they were hidden/buried/private. Assume these can't be real humans- so either web crawlers, or bugs in tracking?
Requests:
1) Total views- any way to switch the DEFAULT table layout sort so today's data is at the top, not the bottom? More interested in today's views than 30 days ago... (I know I can switch this with a click, but I imagine but people have the same preference)
2) New "Popularity" view?
A much larger request... but I would LOVE the ability to see each photo that has been viewed on a specific day- i.e. today- without having to dive into a particular gallery. Right now when I click on "Popularity" and "Today only" I can see a numerical list of each gallery and the number of views... but not the images viewed unless I dive into each gallery.
So the request would be for a "Today's Views" tab that shows a thumbnail of each image, regardless of gallery, and the number of views, sorted by most viewed at top, and only extending to images that had direct views.
That way I could see visually how popular images were getting hits, regardless of which gallery they reside in. Images that received no hits would not be listed.
Hey I can dream, right?
Big props in advance- SmugMug already rocks... and it gets better all the time
Like others I have been using the old and beta stats since the beta was first made available. Looking at the old first, then beta.
When the old data was taken down, I was taken right to the new Total Views screen. My first, instinctual action was to click on today's date. Nothing. Clicked on today's number of photos. Nothing. Clicked on today's data point on the graph. Nothing. I found myself looking for information about what happened today and it wasn't there.
Frustration mounting, I looked for an intuitive way to see all of today's action in one place and found the same problem in Gallery Trends. Clicked on the same places where I expected a link, but nothing. Gallery Details shows comparative view data over time. Photo Trends shows daily action, but only after a laborious process of selecting a gallery and individual photo - regardless of how many galleries one has, this takes way too much time to spot what's generating viewer action and the format is less than ideal. Oddly and unlike the other tabs, Popularity didn't provide the ability to select a gallery. It just showed data for a gallery previously selected by the Gallery Trends & Details tabs (and oddly, not a prior selection in the Photo Trends tab).
A lot of commenters have raised the issue of easily seeing what attracted viewer's attention day by day. I'm not sure any one of the great folks from SmugMug has responded to this particular topic - regardless of whether they can or will add back this capability.
Would be useful if the Total Views pages provided the ability to see which photos were viewed on a given day or at least the latest day. Same for the Gallery Trends tab.
Guess I didn't notice the absence of this capability during the beta comment period because I used the old charts for that purpose. Now I clearly miss it, vainly clicking on dead spots, hoping a missing link has come alive.
Rick
Washington DC: Where taxation without representation thrives.
Apologies for any duplication but I haven't had time to dig into this thread. Following is what I sent to Help@SmugMug earlier, to which they responded that I should post my suggestion/request here:
"Is there a cumulative total for all galleries (total views) shown somewhere - perhaps right before my eyes - that I can't find? If not, please include one for much easier tracking of overall changes rather than our adding up all of the days manually. Same request for each stat tab. The old stats clearly showed the total for the month for each gallery and all galleries. I like the new stats, thanks, but would like that one stat back."
Cheers,
mywaterpolopics.smugmug.com
mywaterpolopics.com
--Doc
http://help.smugmug.com
I emailed SmugMug about the new statistics change and they suggested my thoughts hear. Okay, so here goes:
"I do not like it [statistics] as well as the old one. It may be more detailed, which is fine, but I (really) miss being able to get an overview of the number of hits each gallery was getting. Now, I have to look up each gallery individually, and that is just too cumbersome. Can we have the old statistics option back? Thanks."
skyoftexas
I have a certain day that i got higher than normal views, how do i go about checking where the traffic is from, and to which specific gallery/image?
thanks
We're working on getting referrer stats (where the hits are coming from). As far as which specific gallery/image, just change the stats to a specific day or time period and hit the popularity tab. Then you can go into the specific gallery details to find out which image(s) are the culprits.
I am finding the new stats much slower (the word loading is on the screen a lot) and somewhat less useful than the old ones. The great virtue of the old system was that it was easy to see quickly how different galleries were doing and then see what was happening in galleries of interest.
Under popularity, it would be nice if the photographs could be listed in order of posting rather than popularity. Sometimes I am interested in how new pictures are doing.
Photo trends displays a list of pictures with files names. You can click on a photo to see its stats. It would be nice if it showed the number of times a pictures was viewed as well besides the file names.
I know that stats has been a difficult issue and that a lot of time has been spent on coming up with a workable system. However, I think it needs a few more features and I hope it can be speeded up. Otherwise it is very painful to use.
Under Gallery Details, description "small, med, Large, X Large, original, etc" is listed horizontally only at the top, it's a bit confusing as you scroll down to see how many of hits were of what size.
Agree that the drop down menus do not work well as posted above.
Homepage • Popular
JFriend's javascript customizations • Secrets for getting fast answers on Dgrin
Always include a link to your site when posting a question
http://ebinfl.smugmug.com/
Since I first tried the stats out on smugmug, I decided to switch over to google analytics. You'd be hard pressed to find a better way of tracking the activity on your photos. Here's a few reasons why...
This is even something that smugmug encourages you to do. They've posted info on how to go about doing this and best of all it's free.
Here's how to do it.
http://dgrin.smugmug.com/gallery/1092794
... and once you get your feet wet with it, there are even advanced techniques in the analytics help files that show you how to go about excluding your own traffic on smugmug.
It's not likely that smug stats will ever compare to what you get with google analytics. Urchin Software created the original system, and they used to sell it as a subscription based service for several hundred per month. Google bought them out back in 2005, integrated it into their own systems, made improvements to it, and now gives it away for free. Why not use it?