Stats: Old vs. New; SmugMug Style vs. Collage Landscape

Alameth

It's been a month since I converted to New Smug, and we just finished spamming our users about the photos, so it seemed like a good time to study my stats. I'm noticing a huge increase in views compared to previous years, but I want to understand how much of that is from changes in New Smug, how much is from changes in gallery style, and how much is from increased engagement.

Under Old Smug, I used the SmugMug gallery style almost exclusively. The stats counters had the irritating (but perhaps unavoidable) quirk of upticking the Small and Medium sizes every 12, 16, or 20 images: the first image on each page. For Large sizes and above it seemed that only images people actually clicked on were being counted.

Under New Smug, my new galleries are Collage Landscape style. I'm seeing huge but very uniform counts for the Small and Medium sizes. Both counts are heavily biased towards the beginning of the gallery, with one exception: the panoramic shots (2x1 and 3x1 aspect) are heavily skewed towards medium size. From this I infer that as a user scrolls through a Collage Landscape gallery, the standard images are being counted as Small views, while the panoramic shots are being counted as Medium. The bias towards the start of the gallery is from users who only scroll part way into the gallery, vs. those who scroll down to the end.

But I'm also noticing surprising counts in the large and XL sizes. Is it possible for those to be counted when a user is just scrolling through the gallery? Or does each of those mean the user deliberately clicked on it for a bigger view?

Wendee

You can customize the gallery styles and choose a specific photo size, the default is Small. Unless you have it set to display the Large and XLarge sizes within the customization, I believe it would mean that those sizes are being opened deliberate views.

If you need anything else, please let us know.


Wendee
SmugMug Support Hero
http://help.smugmug.com/

Alameth

Wendee wrote: »

You can customize the gallery styles and choose a specific photo size, the default is Small. Unless you have it set to display the Large and XLarge sizes within the customization, I believe it would mean that those sizes are being opened deliberate views.

! It makes perfect sense that the size setting in the customizer would be the same S, M, L, XL, etc. we see when viewing photos the gallery. I dunno why assumed the size names in the customizer were abstracted. (This also explains why SmugMug Style offers "small" and "tiny" thumbnails.)

I was still puzzled about the handling of the panoramic shots, though; so I did some playing using the "Open Image in New Tab" right-click. Turns out that regardless of the size of my browser window, the 3:2 and 5:4 photos are indeed "small," with filenames like i-6p52JFL/1/S/img_5804-S.jpg. But the 3:1, 4:1, and 5:1 photos can be small, medium, or large depending on the browser window dimensions.

Thanks for the help!