Improve Smugmug Statistics?

rteng · July 8, 2006

Hi everyone,

I know this is really belongs in Feature Requests, but I wanted to find out what other muggers thought about the stats feature and field some more suggestions. Do you think it would be possible to show only recent hits/stats, instead of the cumulative stats? I often do check my statistics, but short of saving the webpage as HTML and using it to compare with the stats page the next day, I don't know what stats have changed significantly, etc. It's frustrating.

My argument is that the statistics feature as it is now is not very useful due to the lack of further breakdown.

I'd also think it'd be a good idea to be able to show the pictures with the most traffic when you access a gallery's stat page, though I have read this suggestion on dGrin before.

So my question to SmugMug is anything in the pipeline for the statistics page? I know it's already hard enough to keep it real-time, and a belated thanks for getting them up again in June, but it'd be really cool to see some advancements. My dream would be to see some links on top of the page to customize the stat page - something like 'Show: Hits today...Hits yesterday...Hits this week.' Though I'd imagine you'd need a bajillion new servers to do this. :rolleyes

Should I keep dreaming?
-Robert

Richard · July 9, 2006

Robert,

Have you looked into Google Analytics or Statcounter? If you can do without the thumbnails, those will give you the kind of information you want.

Regards,

Pezpix · July 9, 2006

rsinmadrid wrote:

Robert,

Have you looked into Google Analytics or Statcounter? If you can do without the thumbnails, those will give you the kind of information you want.

Regards,

FYI Robert, I recently added Google Analytics to my site and love the sheer amounts of data that I have access to on my site in addition to using Smugmugs stats.

Also, if you sign up for Google Analytics and dont immediately get an invite, dont be discouraged as most the time, it can take a few days for the invite to come.

rteng · July 10, 2006

This is true, but I am a Standard mugger (forgot to mention that), so those options are out. :cry

Richard · July 10, 2006

rteng wrote:

This is true, but I am a Standard mugger (forgot to mention that), so those options are out. :cry

You can still do it, though it is cleaner with power or pro accounts. Just include the Statcounter or Google code in each gallery description surrounded by <html> and </html> tags. I did this with Statcounter when I had a standard accout. The main downside is that you have to play around quite a bit to prevent the code from being visible on your homepage (unless you use the Clean option to suppress descriptions). And it will still be visible on mouseovers. But unless something has changed, the counters should still work.

JimM · July 10, 2006

If you click on the graph on the stats page, it will break it down per image.

dwterry · July 10, 2006

I like the idea mentioned here. I would like to add two more ideas that would help me out tremendously. Both of these have to do with the fact that I have a LOT of galleries, and a LOT of images online and the current statistics page could be improved with a couple of simple changes to help me better manage the information:

1) The first issue is that with so many galleries, they need to be in some kind of "order". I don' know what order the statistics page is currently using, but it almost appears to be random. It would be nice if it were ordered according to my smugmug heirarchy (see next item). Or... bare minimum, simply ordering the galleries by when they were created (oldest to newest or vice versa).

2) The second issue is, again, with so many galleries, the names used on the galleries become vague. So much so, that I have to actually click on each of the statistics to drill down into them and find out what they pertain to. For example, I am shooting weddings. So many of my galleries are called "Engagement Proofs" or "Bridal Proofs". If every customer has one or more of these, then the statistics page quickly becomes unmanageable.

An easy solution would be to include my smugmug heirarchy within the naming of the galleries. For instance, instead of just "Engagement Proofs" it could say "Weddings | Mike and Jessica | Engagement Proofs" (where weddings is a smugmug category and "Mike and Jessica" is one of my subcategories (that is how I separate my customers).

Having named the galleries this way on the statistics page - it then becomes trivial to sort the galleries according to my smugmug heirarchy which would then keep all relevant customer galleries together, making it so much easier to digest the information.

Anyway, those two things would help me out tremendously.

Thanks,
David

dmc · July 10, 2006

here are some other similar ideas I had on a previous thread about statistics here. very simple stuff....

Dna · July 10, 2006

dwterry wrote:

2) The second issue is, again, with so many galleries, the names used on the galleries become vague. So much so, that I have to actually click on each of the statistics to drill down into them and find out what they pertain to. For example, I am shooting weddings. So many of my galleries are called "Engagement Proofs" or "Bridal Proofs". If every customer has one or more of these, then the statistics page quickly becomes unmanageable.

Ran into the same problem. My solution was to add the date to the gallery name, not the prettiest but it worked.

I'd also like to see an option to pick various formats. I'd like a simple table with gallery name, thumbs, small, medium, large and original and then just a column with the data. Maybe the option of graphical form if you click on the gallery name.

Dna

Improve Smugmug Statistics?

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