How to get good Smugmug statistics.
redcrown@mchsi.com
Registered Users Posts: 74 Big grins
The Smugmug Statistics debacle forced me to learn Google Analytics (GA). I could not find a decent beginners tutorial on how to use GA on Smugmug, so after a lot of trial-and-error I wrote one. Here it is. Comments, improvements appreciated.
How to find good, usable Smugmug statistics (most popular images) using Google Analytics:
1. From the GA home page select your "profile", that puts you in "Reporting" mode.
2. On the left panel, select "Behavior", then "Site Content", then "Content Drilldown"
3. On the bottom right, set "Show Rows" to a number big enough to show everything you've got. Also, make sure the date range is what you want.
4. In the middle-left pane, click on a page/gallery. Note that everything appears twice. Once with a trailing "/" and once without. Select the ones with the trailing "/".
5. Keep drilling down until you get to images (showing cryptic names).
6. At every point you have to set the rows to an adequate number. GA keeps defaulting back to 10 rows. A minor annoyance that that has generated lots of complaints on various forums. Maybe Goggle will pay attention and fix it.
7. At any point, click on table headers to sort by that field.
8. Click on an image URL (Example: /i-5Gfz6W2/). That will give you a display of all the hits on that image by size (/A, /S, /XL... /O).
9. Can't understand cryptic names, but want to know what the image is? Click on any one cryptic name and on the next screen there will be a little icon following the name. Click on that icon and a new window will pop-up showing that image in Smugmug.
The Google Analytics stats currently include owner views, but they do NOT include inflated and errorneous hits caused by browser "pre-fetching" or other anomalies. Hopefully Smugmug will eliminate the owner views someday (soon?).
Google Analytics will not tell you "Who" accessed your site (IP), but Statcounter does a good job of that. Just ignore the details in Statcounter because they include all the bogus hits.
How to find good, usable Smugmug statistics (most popular images) using Google Analytics:
1. From the GA home page select your "profile", that puts you in "Reporting" mode.
2. On the left panel, select "Behavior", then "Site Content", then "Content Drilldown"
3. On the bottom right, set "Show Rows" to a number big enough to show everything you've got. Also, make sure the date range is what you want.
4. In the middle-left pane, click on a page/gallery. Note that everything appears twice. Once with a trailing "/" and once without. Select the ones with the trailing "/".
5. Keep drilling down until you get to images (showing cryptic names).
6. At every point you have to set the rows to an adequate number. GA keeps defaulting back to 10 rows. A minor annoyance that that has generated lots of complaints on various forums. Maybe Goggle will pay attention and fix it.
7. At any point, click on table headers to sort by that field.
8. Click on an image URL (Example: /i-5Gfz6W2/). That will give you a display of all the hits on that image by size (/A, /S, /XL... /O).
9. Can't understand cryptic names, but want to know what the image is? Click on any one cryptic name and on the next screen there will be a little icon following the name. Click on that icon and a new window will pop-up showing that image in Smugmug.
The Google Analytics stats currently include owner views, but they do NOT include inflated and errorneous hits caused by browser "pre-fetching" or other anomalies. Hopefully Smugmug will eliminate the owner views someday (soon?).
Google Analytics will not tell you "Who" accessed your site (IP), but Statcounter does a good job of that. Just ignore the details in Statcounter because they include all the bogus hits.
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Comments
I'm not sure if I followed every one of your steps, but here are a couple of my "do's":
- Instead of "Content Drilldown", I choose "All Pages" (this is in Site Content).
This allows you to see the path, and all images, in one report. No further drilldown necessary, as far as I can tell. You can also click and visit the image if needed.
- Then, you didn't mention this, but above the first column (page), is a button for Secondary Dimension. There you can choose to add one variable. Interesting ones are City, or Country, etc.
I'm not sure but I believe you cannot have more than one additional variable. It would be nice if we could.
- I believe there is a way for GA to exclude you, if your ip address is a fixed one. Not sure how, and also this was years ago so maybe the rule has changed and I missed it. Being on Verizon cable, my IP address changes, and, I have a friend in another city who is kind of an admin assistant. So, I've made a custom report for all of the above, but then I exclude my city and her city. I realize I lose some data this way for viewers other than myself and my friend, but I'm not too concerned about that. I can access the custom report via the Customization link at the top of the screen.
One thing I thought I was able to do before GA did an upgrade, is that you can also go to Advanced Search (same horizontal line as Secondary dimension, but much further right), and limit to, for example, a single country. That's all well and good but I thought that I could come back to the results and change the secondary variable from Country, to, for example, browser type, and to see all the browser types in the Country I had limited the results to. I swear that's how it used to work but currently if I do that I lose the advanced search one country variable limit. I'd be curious how to achieve the results I thought I used to see, which as far as I know was kind of the only way to filter for 2 variables at once, even if not on all countries at once.
It's kind of fun to share this - as I've wished to do better on GA.