Updated: Stats No Longer Count Owner Views

leftquark

I'm pleased to announce that we pushed a fix for the stats issue where we were counting Owner Views. View counts from the past few months will still include Owner Views, however, starting today browsing your own images will no longer affect the stats. As a result, photo view counts may be decreased from the last few months. SmugMug Stats are now a better representation of who is viewing your photos and how frequently.

AceCo55

Thanks for the update Aaron.
I'm really appreciating your high level of communication and willingness to engage with your customer/forum base.

... and great news about Owner views.

HaraldE

Yes, this is very good news, thanks
Now I will give it some time and see it works as expected Harald

markderry

Great!!!

Alameth

leftquark wrote: »

I'm pleased to announce that we pushed a fix for the stats issue where we were counting Owner Views.

Noticed as soon as I checked in this morning. Thank you thank you thank you!

1VISION

Seriously Good News!!!

Ferguson

So.... are you sure? Not that owner views are no longer counted, but did it do something else?

My views are up significantly since about the time this went live according to Smugmug, but are flat according to google analytics (I realize I am counting different things -- page views for Google). Plus there's no reason to expect them to be up over that period, and it's a big coincidence it happened when this went live.

Anyone else see an uptick?

I don't see anything really odd about what it shows as most popular, etc. Nothing looks wrong exactly, just unusual to see the uptick.

Anyone else?

Postscript: I did a more careful look, and I am seeing an upticket in Google starting around 3/5, but it is small -- from about 910 page views/day on average to 1072 on average. The image views on the other hand went from averaging around 30,600 to 50,734 per day. Give or take a bit where you draw the line -- 3/5 is not a clear delineation due to variation.

But with page views up only about 17% and images up 65% that's a bit of a disconnect.

Is there something about how they counted that may make things go UP?

HaraldE

leftquark wrote: »

starting today browsing your own images will no longer affect the stats.

From what I see I believe things have improved a lot. There is however one area that is a bit unclear to me.

When I (as the owner) download or view using the SmugMiug mobile app, are these views also not counted as hits?

I did a general download the other day and had an unexpected increase for quite a lot of galleries.

Regards, Harald

leftquark

HaraldE wrote: »

When I (as the owner) download or view using the SmugMiug mobile app, are these views also not counted as hits?

This is an excellent question. Let me double check with the team before I jump to answering it. Would you be able to confirm that you've logged into the Mobile App?

leftquark

Ferguson wrote: »

So.... are you sure? Not that owner views are no longer counted, but did it do something else?

My views are up significantly since about the time this went live according to Smugmug, but are flat according to google analytics

Postscript: I did a more careful look, and I am seeing an upticket in Google starting around 3/5, but it is small -- from about 910 page views/day on average to 1072 on average. The image views on the other hand went from averaging around 30,600 to 50,734 per day. Give or take a bit where you draw the line -- 3/5 is not a clear delineation due to variation.

I took a look at your SmugMug statistics and I'm seeing that your image views also seem flat, or perhaps are a bit down due to the change. In the last 7 days (excluding today, since views don't seem to be for the complete day) you have averaged ~48,000 views. In the previous 7 days (March 10 - 16) you averaged ~54,500 views. If we go back to March 5th, your views increase even more, to about 55,000 views per day. It seems to match what we would expect with owner views not counting. Am I missing something?

HaraldE

leftquark wrote: »

Would you be able to confirm that you've logged into the Mobile App?

Thanks for investigating

When you tell me what to expect I can do some testing. But it will have to wait till after easter ... family is allways top priority

Regards, Harald

Ferguson

leftquark wrote: »

I took a look at your SmugMug statistics and I'm seeing that your image views also seem flat, or perhaps are a bit down due to the change. In the last 7 days (excluding today, since views don't seem to be for the complete day) you have averaged ~48,000 views. In the previous 7 days (March 10 - 16) you averaged ~54,500 views. If we go back to March 5th, your views increase even more, to about 55,000 views per day. It seems to match what we would expect with owner views not counting. Am I missing something?

Are we seeing the same things?

I looked back over 3 months, and the right side just looks naturally higher on average. If you sort of mentally draw a line through the right 25 days or so, it's significantly higher than the left 90 days or so. Depending on exactly where you make the cutoff it is either a bit earlier than, or around the time of your change.

I think you are looking at smaller intervals. The image views are very erratic, I was trying to look at more long term averages. Also, I'm trying to ignore the very high outliers in such a mental line, though I included them in the numerical averages, which were a straight average by day over the entire period (I think from 12/1, but approximately).

Obviously it could be something different, unrelated to smugmug. These are sporting events, and depending on interest in the event, and how much the gallery gets shared, I get spikes. But to me the right quarter or so of this chart is higher relative to the left 3/4, and I don't see that in page views.

It doesn't matter all that much to me, I don't monetize based on it or anything. It is more curiosity than anything else, and that's the main reason I was wondering if anyone else who tracks both had similar reaction.

leftquark

Ferguson wrote: »

Are we seeing the same things?

Right now it's really hard to do a left vs right comparison because there's only about 9 days worth of data (when I ran your averages, it was 7 days) that don't count owner views. We'll have to give it a bit more time so we can do longer comparisons and see.

I took your raw data and ran a 7 day average after the change was made. I then repeated it for the 7 days before the change was made (so we could compare the same # of days). The numbers after the change were slightly down. I expanded the "prior to change" data by a few weeks and the # of views per day went up even more. Of course this also depends on how often you are/were viewing your own photos. If you weren't viewing your own photos every day and had some days which had more or less views, it's hard to figure out what the data should look like. Overall we're seeing the stats (across multiple users accounts since we released this) are not counting owner views*.

*: See my next post....

leftquark

HaraldE wrote: »

When I (as the owner) download or view using the SmugMiug mobile app, are these views also not counted as hits?

After talking with our teams it appears that we are NOT discounting owner views when viewed in the iOS app. Not counting owner views in the stats only applies to views from the web. :cry

We're currently investigating what we can do to solve this. I'll update you when we know more.

Ferguson

leftquark wrote: »

Right now it's really hard to do a left vs right comparison....

It's even harder since I didn't post the attachment to show you what I was looking it.

Again... don't spend time on it unless you hear from others that they see an unexpected uptick. I really didn't expect much of a down-tick because I don't spend much time on my own site, certainly not in comparison to outside views. And it may just be something else -- basketball march madness perhaps. Maybe the galleries were a bit larger lately (which, if someone scrolls to the end, I think counts as one page view but more image views). Could be a lot of things, and a coincidence that (to me at least) it looked like it went up about the same time.

I put the image in the post 2 above.

PS. I am not looking on Apple but desktops.

Ferguson

leftquark wrote: »

After talking with our teams it appears that we are NOT discounting owner views when viewed in the iOS app. .

When you use the Android app (not sure if its the same), since it caches all the images, can I assume it counts at most one per image?

or when it is checking for updates, is it touching each image each night again?

Alameth

Ferguson wrote: »

So.... are you sure? Not that owner views are no longer counted, but did it do something else?

My views are up significantly since about the time this went live according to Smugmug, but are flat according to google analytics (I realize I am counting different things -- page views for Google). Plus there's no reason to expect them to be up over that period, and it's a big coincidence it happened when this went live.

Anyone else see an uptick?

Since my site is very small, the inclusion of my own views hit my stats hard, and I noticed the change back just a couple of days after it was made. There were some funny bumps in the stats, though, so I did some checking. (One of the few advantages of a small site. ) All the views were accounted for by end users.

leftquark

Ferguson wrote: »

When you use the Android app (not sure if its the same), since it caches all the images, can I assume it counts at most one per image?

That would be the case, but it caches the entire gallery, even if you didn't paginate it down, so if you had a gallery with 1,000 images and you only looked at the first 10, you'll see stats showing 1,000 images were loaded.

Ferguson

leftquark wrote: »

That would be the case, but it caches the entire gallery, even if you didn't paginate it down, so if you had a gallery with 1,000 images and you only looked at the first 10, you'll see stats showing 1,000 images were loaded.

That's fine, and I love that aspect -- I don't even have to look at a gallery and (by the next day) it is all there for me to show someone offline.

Just didn't want to think it was 1000 hits daily.

Thanks.

zubenelgenubi

Thanks for fixing the stats
Thanks Smugmug for fixing the "owner views" stats issue!

Reliable and informative stats are mission critical for a site like Smugmug, and I am very pleased to hear that I can start looking at them again. (I hadn't even bothered with them for the preceding few months, because I figured they'd ceased to mean anything.)

Thanks again!

- Mark

Jerry Latta Photography

I too want to say thanks for changing the view to not include the owner or uploads. I was one of the ones (in the other thread) that didn't like the change. Since I was one that complained I feel that I needed to say that I appreciate the change.

Jerry

HaraldE

leftquark wrote: »

After talking with our teams it appears that we are NOT discounting owner views when viewed in the iOS app. Not counting owner views in the stats only applies to views from the web. :cry

We're currently investigating what we can do to solve this. I'll update you when we know more.

Morning,

I would be very interested in knowing if the above issue is being worked on?
Is there any update on this?

Regards, Harald

leftquark

HaraldE wrote: »

I would be very interested in knowing if the above issue is being worked on?
Is there any update on this?

We've done a few things on this and we have a lot more to do. For the time being, we've stopped counting all views from the mobile apps in stats: both owners and visitors. Since most of the mobile views were owner views anyways, this shouldn't effect stats at all. Being able to add in visitor mobile app views is a bit more complicated and something we're still wanting to get added in.

Please let me know if you have any other questions!

HaraldE

leftquark wrote: »

After talking with our teams it appears that we are NOT discounting owner views when viewed in the iOS app. Not counting owner views in the stats only applies to views from the web. :cry

We're currently investigating what we can do to solve this. I'll update you when we know more.

leftquark wrote: »

We've done a few things on this and we have a lot more to do. For the time being, we've stopped counting all views from the mobile apps in stats: both owners and visitors. Since most of the mobile views were owner views anyways, this shouldn't effect stats at all. Being able to add in visitor mobile app views is a bit more complicated and something we're still wanting to get added in.

Please let me know if you have any other questions!

Brilliant, this gives me just what I want, thanks a lot

It also explains why I lately haven't seen an increase when I've done a download myself. I did a download this past night and the stats were not effected.

Since I am the only user and there is no visitor, this is all fine with me

Again, thanks and best regards, Harald

phaserbeam

Well... i'm not sure about that issue... i locked *ALL* of my galleries one or two weeks ago ( i even changed the folder structure to make sure no bookmarks will continue to work) and in the past few days i still get hits on my photos. Yesterday for example about 150 hits. Two days ago for sure one photo that is part of a p/w protected gallery and not included in the public background slideshow gallery on my homepage (which does not show any hits itself... but maybe because of this gallery only includes collected photos from other galleries). So... if there is no way to view a photo included in a p/w-protected gallery by anonymous users the stats must count either my own views or the counts of the SmugMug team ;-)

Not a big issue... just wondering

leftquark

phaserbeam wrote: »

Well... i'm not sure about that issue... i locked *ALL* of my galleries one or two weeks ago ( i even changed the folder structure to make sure no bookmarks will continue to work) and in the past few days i still get hits on my photos. Yesterday for example about 150 hits. Two days ago for sure one photo that is part of a p/w protected gallery and not included in the public background slideshow gallery on my homepage (which does not show any hits itself... but maybe because of this gallery only includes collected photos from other galleries). So... if there is no way to view a photo included in a p/w-protected gallery by anonymous users the stats must count either my own views or the counts of the SmugMug team ;-)

Not a big issue... just wondering

I'll double check with our stats Engineer on Monday but it looks like most of those hits came from 1 gallery. Any chance that was someone who had access?

phaserbeam

leftquark wrote: »

I'll double check with our stats Engineer on Monday but it looks like most of those hits came from 1 gallery. Any chance that was someone who had access?

Yesterday there were 20 hits... i can see at least nine galleries affected. Well... i can set a new password for the top level directory but for sure i did not share the password. Ill set a new password and will also double check that... thx for reply.


P.S. I checked the 150 hits from two days ago again... there are a lot of galleries i did not check myself for a long time. So for sure not my own hits. So either some1 got the password or there must be something weired going on.
A lot of those 45 galleries do have only one hit. I don't think that if some1 got the password he would walk through all the galleries and watch a single photo. Could it be that the stats count hits from the organizer which shows the gallery icons/thumbs? Some of the the photos in the stats i have used as gallery icons.

leftquark

phaserbeam wrote: »

Yesterday there were 20 hits... i can see at least nine galleries affected. Well... i can set a new password for the top level directory but for sure i did not share the password. Ill set a new password and will also double check that... thx for reply.

Those might have been me. Our stats engineer is looking into it now...

leftquark

phaserbeam wrote: »

Yesterday there were 20 hits... i can see at least nine galleries affected. Well... i can set a new password for the top level directory but for sure i did not share the password. Ill set a new password and will also double check that... thx for reply.


P.S. I checked the 150 hits from two days ago again... there are a lot of galleries i did not check myself for a long time. So for sure not my own hits. So either some1 got the password or there must be something weired going on.
A lot of those 45 galleries do have only one hit. I don't think that if some1 got the password he would walk through all the galleries and watch a single photo. Could it be that the stats count hits from the organizer which shows the gallery icons/thumbs? Some of the the photos in the stats i have used as gallery icons.

Were these photos ever public at any point? It looks like the hits came from web crawlers? We've gone to great lengths to make sure that moving photos around won't break external links to your photos, so moving the photos to different galleries won't prevent people from finding photos, if you've already shared or embedded them. Additionally, if they were ever public, it's possible that web crawlers already grabbed the image ID and can thus still get access to crawl the photo again. The best way to prevent anyone (or anything) from hitting the photo would be to set the galleries as Private (only you) or Private Sharing.

Feel free to let us know if you'd like us to keep digging, however, we've confirmed that owner views aren't being counted

phaserbeam

leftquark wrote: »

Were these photos ever public at any point? It looks like the hits came from web crawlers? We've gone to great lengths to make sure that moving photos around won't break external links to your photos, so moving the photos to different galleries won't prevent people from finding photos, if you've already shared or embedded them. Additionally, if they were ever public, it's possible that web crawlers already grabbed the image ID and can thus still get access to crawl the photo again. The best way to prevent anyone (or anything) from hitting the photo would be to set the galleries as Private (only you) or Private Sharing.

Feel free to let us know if you'd like us to keep digging, however, we've confirmed that owner views aren't being counted

Yes, they were once public... but externel embedding was always off. I never used the feature "Get a link" (always disabled). Also site should not be visible to search engines. Anyway... I had a look at todays stats and again there are a lot of photos that are used as gallery icons/featured image only. As i said earlier, not a big issue... just want to know where these hits come from. So, just for testing, i'll take your idea and set gallery to private and i will see if that might be the reason.

HaraldE

leftquark wrote: »

We've done a few things on this and we have a lot more to do. For the time being, we've stopped counting all views from the mobile apps in stats: both owners and visitors. Since most of the mobile views were owner views anyways, this shouldn't effect stats at all. Being able to add in visitor mobile app views is a bit more complicated and something we're still wanting to get added in.

Please let me know if you have any other questions!

Morning,

As far as I can see my own views in the mobile app is still being counted. What is the status of this?

Regards, Harald