External Statistics (StatCounter, etc) with SmugMug Beta RC1

jfriend · January 11, 2007

onethumb wrote:

Let's be clear here - SmugMug's new stats tracking (in BETA) now shows you exactly how many views each photo has had.

So you lose page tracking, but you gain image tracking. That may not be enough if you're looking for actual web logs, but if you're looking for which photos get viewed the most, that's now built-in. (It wasn't before). So basically the biggest reason people use StatCounter (at least based on the feedback we've received) is now a non-issue.

I'm working on more robust page tracking to be built-in on SmugMug so Analytics and the like aren't necessary, but I'd love to hear some feedback (start another thread, maybe? Let's not pollute this thread.) on exactly what you'd like to see.

Don

Let me know if you want to take this conversation somewhere else. I find the Smugmug stats presentation completely unusable for what I'm trying to see. I use StatCounter for the following information and it tells me this in one nice summary screen:

What galleries/images have people been looking at recently?
Where did my viewers come from (referral URLs)? This tells me what online postings they found me from.
Where are the people coming from geographically (this tells me things like whether my mom actually looked at the pictures or not)?

If you break StatCounter and Google Analytics and don't offer similar kind of functionality, you will have a bunch of unhappy users. I applaud trying to improve Smugmug's stats so these 3rd party services aren't needed by most, but you'll need a lot more functionality before people are happy to throw them away. In fact, you have access to data that these 3rd party guys can't track at all (like direct link hits and referrers on direct links) so you could do an even better job than they do.

Here are some things that drive me absolutely nuts about Smugmug's statistics that drove me to one of the other services:

It's a flat list of galleries in a seemingly random order. For someone with hundreds of galleries (like I have because of my event photography), it's impossible and way too time consuming to find anything.
There's no sense of time. It's a month worth of hits, but absolutely no way to see what happened today or yesterday or see how each of the days in the last week compare to each other.
There's no easy way to see which images within a gallery are getting the traffic. You have to look at a gallery full of thumbs and try to find the images that are getting the hits. No sorting or ranking, no time element.

Contrast this with the main view I use in Statcounter that shows me how many hits I've received each of the last seven days and then shows me the last 100 hits and where the hits came from (both referrer and IP address location). If I'm curious, I can quickly browse the hit links to see which images they were (thumbnails would be even better).

If you have new stats stuff that you think will obviate the need for StatCounter, I'd be happy to look at it and comment. Making an image count fix to what you had is a long ways from what I use StatCounter for.

Allen · January 11, 2007

Statcounter goes way beyond the Smugmug popular gallery, it allows me to
see exactly what photos in a gallery are viewed, by whom, where the
reside and how they got there. It's very useful watching someone browse
through different galleries and pages and see exactly what photos were of
interest on each page. I also get an idea of how people navigate my site.

Just my .02
Al

devbobo · January 11, 2007

At present, on the live site each thumbnail link has the className 'photoLink', but on the BETA this className no longer exists.

If it still did, you could easily get Google Analytics or Statcounter working using this code in the footer...

YE.on(YD.getElementsByClassName('photoLink', 'a'),'click',urchinTracker);

Cheers,

David

Allen · January 11, 2007

devbobo wrote:

At present, on the live site each thumbnail link has the className 'photoLink', but on the BETA this className no longer exists.

If it still did, you could easily get Google Analytics or Statcounter working using this code in the footer...

YE.on(YD.getElementsByClassName('photoLink', 'a'),'click',urchinTracker);

Cheers,

David

:hideBrings up a question, can it be added?:D Need one for LB also.:D
Al

jfriend · January 11, 2007

Question

devbobo wrote:

At present, on the live site each thumbnail link has the className 'photoLink', but on the BETA this className no longer exists.

If it still did, you could easily get Google Analytics or Statcounter working using this code in the footer...

YE.on(YD.getElementsByClassName('photoLink', 'a'),'click',urchinTracker);

Cheers,

David

David, can you explain what that code does and how it works? And, were you suggesting an individual user who wants to use StatCounter would do this or that Smugmug would make StatCounter work by doing this?

devbobo · January 11, 2007

jfriend wrote:

David, can you explain what that code does and how it works? And, were you suggesting an individual user who wants to use StatCounter would do this or that Smugmug would make StatCounter work by doing this?

no problem John.

YE.on (or YE.addListener) attachs event handlers to elements, and what is cool about it....it allows you to pass in an array of elements...either objects or id strings. So by calling YD.getElementsByClassName, this call would return an array of elements, in this case being the hyperlink attached to each thumbnail.

So the code effectively attachs an onclick event to each thumbnail hyperlink. Since that className doesn't exist, i will have to come up with something slightly different, but the concept will be the same.

yes...this code you need to be applied by the user.

Cheers,

David

devbobo · January 11, 2007

Also, i should have mentioned that this example was Google Analytic specific, since it was calling the function urchinTracker().

Just had a quick look, and it's not as straightforward for statcounter. But something should be possible.

bwg · January 11, 2007

devbobo wrote:

Since that className doesn't exist, i will have to come up with something slightly different

you are stubborn.

what's wrong with the code I gave you?

:devbobo

jfriend · January 11, 2007

JavaScript design suggestion

devbobo wrote:

no problem John.

YE.on (or YE.addListener) attachs event handlers to elements, and what is cool about it....it allows you to pass in an array of elements...either objects or id strings. So by calling YD.getElementsByClassName, this call would return an array of elements, in this case being the hyperlink attached to each thumbnail.

So the code effectively attachs an onclick event to each thumbnail hyperlink. Since that className doesn't exist, i will have to come up with something slightly different, but the concept will be the same.

yes...this code you need to be applied by the user.

Cheers,

David

Hmm. If Don hasn't done so already, I would strongly suggest that he make sure his JavaScript for displaying a new image (no matter how it's done - by click or by keystroke or by slideshow timer) has something that can be easily hooked by an external JavaScript event handler. That would make solving problems like these very easy. This "onclick" handler solution is probably specific to a mouse click when there are now lots of other ways to get a new image loaded. It's probably best if a hook is possible after a new main image has been displayed so any hooking JavaScript can see the new state. That would give the new design the equivalent of an OnLoad hook since that no longer gets called when a new image is displayed.

Does this extensible suggestion make sense to you other JavaScripters? Did I explain it well enough to understand what I meant?

onethumb · January 11, 2007

jfriend wrote:

Let me know if you want to take this conversation somewhere else. I find the Smugmug stats presentation completely unusable for what I'm trying to see. I use StatCounter for the following information and it tells me this in one nice summary screen:
What galleries/images have people been looking at recently?

Can you define "recently"? What granularity do you care about? And does this "recent" data expire, or can you get access to it at any time?

For example, if you wanted to find out what the most popular images were on Dec 25th, 2006 between 6:00pm and 6:05pm, can you? Is functionality like that important to you?

jfriend wrote:

[*]Where did my viewers come from (referral URLs)? This tells me what online postings they found me from.

Do you care about all referrer URLs, including SmugMug and/or your custom domain? Or only non-SmugMug domains?

jfriend wrote:

[*]Where are the people coming from geographically (this tells me things like whether my mom actually looked at the pictures or not)?If you break StatCounter and Google Analytics and don't offer similar kind of functionality, you will have a bunch of unhappy users. I applaud trying to improve Smugmug's stats so these 3rd party services aren't needed by most, but you'll need a lot more functionality before people are happy to throw them away. In fact, you have access to data that these 3rd party guys can't track at all (like direct link hits and referrers on direct links) so you could do an even better job than they do.

Here are some things that drive me absolutely nuts about Smugmug's statistics that drove me to one of the other services:
It's a flat list of galleries in a seemingly random order. For someone with hundreds of galleries (like I have because of my event photography), it's impossible and way too time consuming to find anything.

There's no sense of time. It's a month worth of hits, but absolutely no way to see what happened today or yesterday or see how each of the days in the last week compare to each other.

There's no easy way to see which images within a gallery are getting the traffic. You have to look at a gallery full of thumbs and try to find the images that are getting the hits. No sorting or ranking, no time element.

Contrast this with the main view I use in Statcounter that shows me how many hits I've received each of the last seven days and then shows me the last 100 hits and where the hits came from (both referrer and IP address location). If I'm curious, I can quickly browse the hit links to see which images they were (thumbnails would be even better).

If you have new stats stuff that you think will obviate the need for StatCounter, I'd be happy to look at it and comment. Making an image count fix to what you had is a long ways from what I use StatCounter for.

Great feedback, most of which I'm already tackling.

One big, huge, issue for me that I'd love answered is:

What would you rather have: great image stats or great page stats? Or do you need both?

Don

onethumb · January 11, 2007

jfriend wrote:

Hmm. If Don hasn't done so already, I would strongly suggest that he make sure his JavaScript for displaying a new image (no matter how it's done - by click or by keystroke or by slideshow timer) has something that can be easily hooked by an external JavaScript event handler. That would make solving problems like these very easy. This "onclick" handler solution is probably specific to a mouse click when there are now lots of other ways to get a new image loaded. It's probably best if a hook is possible after a new main image has been displayed so any hooking JavaScript can see the new state. That would give the new design the equivalent of an OnLoad hook since that no longer gets called when a new image is displayed.

Does this extensible suggestion make sense to you other JavaScripters? Did I explain it well enough to understand what I meant?

This is a great idea. We're working on it.

Don

jfriend · January 11, 2007

Some answers to your questions

onethumb wrote:

Can you define "recently"? What granularity do you care about? And does this "recent" data expire, or can you get access to it at any time?

I'm using the free StatCounter account. The per-page data is LRU, only recording the last 100 hits. The summary data is the last seven days. The summary data is all I've ever needed for my purposes. The per-page data is kind of limiting at only the last 100 hits because when one viewer looks at a lot of things, that overwrites what any of the other recent viewers did. At StatCounter, you can pay to get much larger logs - I've just been too cheap to do that. If log space was at a premium, the most important things to me are where did the visitors come from, where are they located in the world and generally what did they look at. Like was said elsewhere in this thread, it's also incredibly useful to see what path they followed through my galleries. You can learn a lot about what people find interesting from that. For example, I've learned that people love to look at my "popular" pages. I would never know that purely from image hits. A direct link to the popular pages is now in my sig because I realized that through this kind of data.

Here's an example of the overall week summary from StatCounter:

onethumb wrote:

For example, if you wanted to find out what the most popular images were on Dec 25th, 2006 between 6:00pm and 6:05pm, can you? Is functionality like that important to you?[IMG]file:///C:/DOCUME%7E1/jfriend/LOCALS%7E1/Temp/moz-screenshot.jpg[/IMG][IMG]file:///C:/DOCUME%7E1/jfriend/LOCALS%7E1/Temp/moz-screenshot-1.jpg[/IMG]

I've only been interested in what happened recently which is the last week for me. Because of my day job or vacations, I can't always look every day so it's nice to cover 1-2 weeks, but I personally have no reason to go back further than that. Some monthly summary data is occasionally useful when I want to see the sum total effect of posting a big school event after everyone has had their looks, but that's less important that recent info. I could image that other's may have a different opinion on this one, but that's how I think of it.

Here's a StatCounter example of recent hit data that shows the viewer's geographical location, their referrer URL and their path through my galleries:

onethumb wrote:

Do you care about all referrer URLs, including SmugMug and/or your custom domain? Or only non-SmugMug domains?

I like to know where people are coming from, no matter where they come from. I can see whether they come from Google or whether they come from a forum posting or whether they come from a Smugmug search or whether they come from some other Smugmug browse. I'm equally interested in all regardless of inside Smugmug or outside. The question to answer is how did people find me? I'm only doing this as a hobby. I would think people really trying to drive traffic to their site as a business would really care about this a lot because it would tell them what promotional tactics were working the most effectively.

onethumb wrote:

Great feedback, most of which I'm already tackling.

One big, huge, issue for me that I'd love answered is:

What would you rather have: great image stats or great page stats? Or do you need both?

Don

I don't really think of it as image stats vs. page stats. To me it's image stats and gallery stats. Both are interesting. Image stats are probably more important than gallery stats to me, but it depends upon which question you are trying to answer at the time. For example, if I'm trying to figure out if the school parents are pretty much done viewing the 30 galleries I posted from the talent show, I'd like to see gallery hit stats at a glance to answer that question. If I want to know which are the most popular images in any given gallery or all across galleries, I need to see ranked image hits.

onethumb · January 12, 2007

jfriend wrote:

I'm using the free StatCounter account. The per-page data is LRU, only recording the last 100 hits. The summary data is the last seven days. The summary data is all I've ever needed for my purposes. The per-page data is kind of limiting at only the last 100 hits because when one viewer looks at a lot of things, that overwrites what any of the other recent viewers did. At StatCounter, you can pay to get much larger logs - I've just been too cheap to do that. If log space was at a premium, the most important things to me are where did the visitors come from, where are they located in the world and generally what did they look at. Like was said elsewhere in this thread, it's also incredibly useful to see what path they followed through my galleries. You can learn a lot about what people find interesting from that. For example, I've learned that people love to look at my "popular" pages. I would never know that purely from image hits. A direct link to the popular pages is now in my sig because I realized that through this kind of data.

Here's an example of the overall week summary from StatCounter:

I've only been interested in what happened recently which is the last week for me. Because of my day job or vacations, I can't always look every day so it's nice to cover 1-2 weeks, but I personally have no reason to go back further than that. Some monthly summary data is occasionally useful when I want to see the sum total effect of posting a big school event after everyone has had their looks, but that's less important that recent info. I could image that other's may have a different opinion on this one, but that's how I think of it.

Here's a StatCounter example of recent hit data that shows the viewer's geographical location, their referrer URL and their path through my galleries:

I like to know where people are coming from, no matter where they come from. I can see whether they come from Google or whether they come from a forum posting or whether they come from a Smugmug search or whether they come from some other Smugmug browse. I'm equally interested in all regardless of inside Smugmug or outside. The question to answer is how did people find me? I'm only doing this as a hobby. I would think people really trying to drive traffic to their site as a business would really care about this a lot because it would tell them what promotional tactics were working the most effectively.

I don't really think of it as image stats vs. page stats. To me it's image stats and gallery stats. Both are interesting. Image stats are probably more important than gallery stats to me, but it depends upon which question you are trying to answer at the time. For example, if I'm trying to figure out if the school parents are pretty much done viewing the 30 galleries I posted from the talent show, I'd like to see gallery hit stats at a glance to answer that question. If I want to know which are the most popular images in any given gallery or all across galleries, I need to see ranked image hits.

This stuff is like gold. Thanks.

You say "gallery stats and image stats" but I really think you want more. Your info about wanting to know about people liking /popular is evidence of that.

I'll get back to you when I have something more substantial built into SmugMug, since I think it only makes sense that we provide rich tools and data to our customers, but until then, we've got a JavaScript hook coming any minute.

Stay tuned...

Don

onethumb · January 12, 2007

onethumb wrote:

This is a great idea. We're working on it.

Don

First pass at a new event is out. See the BETA wiki page for more info.

We're happy to tweak, extend, or start over - just give us some feedback.

Don

rich56k · January 12, 2007

onethumb wrote:

This stuff is like gold. Thanks.

You say "gallery stats and image stats" but I really think you want more. Your info about wanting to know about people liking /popular is evidence of that.

I'll get back to you when I have something more substantial built into SmugMug, since I think it only makes sense that we provide rich tools and data to our customers, but until then, we've got a JavaScript hook coming any minute.

Stay tuned...

Don

Don,
So far things are looking great!

Thanks to jfriend for the all the feedback... exactly my sentiments ,
I pay for the 1100 'page load' log from statcounter and find its invaluable on my pro acct. - the biggest item being where the visit linked from, as I actively pursue networking opportunities with like minded m/cycle sites...
so far it's been paying off with some great spikes in traffic that coincide with photo/link placement at other sites...
that being said the greatest accomplishment you could provide is to replicate the entire statcounter data experience as it stands the only down side that i see w/statctr now, is that to save the data you must save 1 page at a time as a pdf, in each 'catagory' individually (see att for list of cats) - can represent 15 or more pages per catagory.... they (statctr) only offers a 'log download' of the summary stat jfriend already posted...(a feature that is woefully inadequete-statctr says their working on it but thats been 6 mos no word yet) Best would be a one click option to save complete set of stat as a pdf!!
thats my.02

So my question is: it possible the 'hook' you're working on will allow statcounter to provide all its features? (ideally)
And then be replaced by our own 'smug/stat/ctr' will same capabilities?

Lastly thanks again for the opp. to provide feedback that will shape the final outcome!!

rich56k

onethumb · January 12, 2007

rich56k wrote:

Don,
So far things are looking great!

Thanks to jfriend for the all the feedback... exactly my sentiments ,
I pay for the 1100 'page load' log from statcounter and find its invaluable on my pro acct. - the biggest item being where the visit linked from, as I actively pursue networking opportunities with like minded m/cycle sites...
so far it's been paying off with some great spikes in traffic that coincide with photo/link placement at other sites...
that being said the greatest accomplishment you could provide is to replicate the entire statcounter data experience as it stands the only down side that i see w/statctr now, is that to save the data you must save 1 page at a time as a pdf, in each 'catagory' individually (see att for list of cats) - can represent 15 or more pages per catagory.... they (statctr) only offers a 'log download' of the summary stat jfriend already posted...(a feature that is woefully inadequete-statctr says their working on it but thats been 6 mos no word yet) Best would be a one click option to save complete set of stat as a pdf!!
thats my.02

So my question is: it possible the 'hook' you're working on will allow statcounter to provide all its features? (ideally)
And then be replaced by our own 'smug/stat/ctr' will same capabilities?

Lastly thanks again for the opp. to provide feedback that will shape the final outcome!!
rich56k

In a perfect world, we'd like things like StatCounter to always work, even if you have to jump through a minor hoop or two to get them to work with the new turbo-charged SmugMug.

As we continue to add features, it makes sense that we would duplicate some and/or all of what StatCounter provides because our customers are asking for it.

But even then, there are certainly cases (say your SmugMug site is only a fraction of your total website, for example) where you might want statistics outside of the SmugMug experience.

We'll definitely expose everything we build via our API, too, so 3rd party apps like Star*Explorer can do fun things with them.

Don

rich56k · January 12, 2007

Wasn't sure how to do a second att so here's the balance of my wish list....
if had to choose say 2 out of the above list, it would be "came from" and
"recent visitor activity" (see att below) for it's wealth of information....

rich

UPDATE: Hoops are OK with me!!
Thanks again for your personal attention to us customers!

richpepp · January 12, 2007

FWIW I also find the ability in Analytics to exclude traffic from certain IP addresses to be very useful although its not a critical issue as it's not difficult for me to identify.

tx

Rich

devbobo · January 12, 2007

for Google Analytics, the following code should work...

onPhotoShow.subscribe(urchinTracker);

StatCounter is not going to be as easy. Unfortunately, the script isn't function based...so it will need to be rewritten as a hack.

colourbox · January 12, 2007

richpepp wrote:

FWIW I also find the ability in Analytics to exclude traffic from certain IP addresses to be very useful although its not a critical issue as it's not difficult for me to identify.

I see this as semi-critical. The inability for the current Smugmug stats to exclude (as far as I know) pollutes the stats. My site is not high-volume so my own hits can constitute a significant portion of my stats, which reduces their value quite a bit. When I first create and edit a gallery, too many of the hits are my own.

Here is a Smugmug problem I ran into the other day. I posted an image on a dgrin thread. I went to my stats an hour later to see if anyone had looked at the thread, by checking the image hits. There were a few hits. A few moments later I reloaded. Hey, it went up. I reloaded again. Up again. Wait a minute...only the thumbnail is incrementing. Hang on...all the thumbnails in the gallery are incrementing. That's when I realized that my act of reloading my Smugmug stats was incrementing the thumbnail hit count, because the thumbnails are on the stats page! Arrgh...the Smugmug stats don't protect against the classic problem of altering something simply by observing it.

I really like StatCounter's exclusion ability:
You can exclude IP addresses from the stats.
You can add a browser cookie to exclude that browser on that machine from the stats.

This is a brilliant approach because I can stop any computer in my home from being counted just by entering one IP address into StatCounter. Furthermore, if I take my laptop down to the cafe, even thought the IP address is different there I won't be counted because of the browser cookie, while my friend on his laptop next to me will create a stat hit. And, because it's a browser cookie, I can exclude every browser on every operating system on my Mac. No accidental counts. Brilliant.

So, I hope the new Smugmug stats have a robust count exclusion feature. And thanks for the continued hard work.

Luc De Jaeger · January 12, 2007

I absolutely agree with jfriend, richpepp and colourbox. I too use the free statcounter option (together with the Google analytics) to track my smugmug pages and it would be top-notch if smugmug could include statcounter's utilities and features. Even if I check my stats at smugmug I often ask myself why I still do that as statcounter gives the best and most valuable information in plain English... Perhaps hoping on better?:D IMHO Google is quite difficult to understand and not that userfriendly.

The option to exclude the own IP address as asked by colourbox makes totally sense in my opinion. The more handy features the better. It's up to us to use them or not depending on what our goasl are (amateur and pro photographers).

I'm especially interested to know where someone found my photos, how many times someone watched a photo (as thumbnail or in any other format), what keywords were used and, well, all the current statcounter features

!

Anyway, I'm over the top that smugmug people are doing all these efforts to bring the best for us! I'm still amazed!

jfriend · January 12, 2007

Cool

onethumb wrote:

First pass at a new event is out. See the BETA wiki page for more info.

We're happy to tweak, extend, or start over - just give us some feedback.

Don

Cool! It's always fun when feedback gets incorporated the same day. Thanks for listening.

Now, I just need someone else to figure out how to make StatCounter work with the new event or I need to find the time to look at it myself.

onethumb · January 12, 2007

jfriend wrote:

Cool! It's always fun when feedback gets incorporated the same day. Thanks for listening.

Now, I just need someone else to figure out how to make StatCounter work with the new event or I need to find the time to look at it myself.

BigWebGuy is working on it, so if you want to fiddle too, you might want to compare notes.

I'll make sure he sees this thread.

Don

bwg · January 12, 2007

devbobo wrote:

for Google Analytics, the following code should work...

onPhotoShow.subscribe(urchinTracker);

StatCounter is not going to be as easy. Unfortunately, the script isn't function based...so it will need to be rewritten as a hack.

This wont work mate. GA has code that prevents it from running more than one time per page load.

I'm busy in the lab testing some stuff...fingers crossed.

devbobo · January 12, 2007

bigwebguy wrote:

This wont work mate. GA has code that prevents it from running more than one time per page load.

I'm busy in the lab testing some stuff...fingers crossed.

Lee,

I know you that you have probably worked this out, but you are going to need different logic for gallery pages as opposed to homepage/category/sub-category pages. Ohterwise, it will result in a additional hit everytime a gallery page is loaded.

Cheers,

David

tinachamberlain · January 13, 2007

All the comments in this thread are great. I also use StatCounter and Google Analytics and they have both given me a lot of information that I was unable to receive via Smugmug. I would be at a loss if those same capabilities were no longer available, even for a short time period, when these changes are brought live.

I do not pay for those services, like others do, however I do find them to be most useful to me for all the same reasons others have already posted. The information that I receive in the free service has so far given me all the information I have needed, one day I may need to go further but so far that hasn't been the case.

If Smugmug can offer those same services, then I would be very happy.

If it is not possible to have these Stats available to us when the changes are brought live, then I would like to request that the version is not brought Live until we are able to have these Stats available to us.

Just my .02 worth.

Tina

System · January 13, 2007

Another oar in the water: Sitemeter
I've been using Sitemeter for about 5 years on my weblog (and like lots of the other cheapskates in this thread, I don't pay them for it at the moment :-), and so when I set up my trial-soon-to-be-pro as-soon-as-I-get-the-8x10-in-the-mail account this week, I put a new Sitemeter counter on the bottom of the page.

And it's working just like I want it to:

(my apologies for the size of these screenshots; I forgot how hi-res my laptop panel is)

So, I can see both visit and page counts there, and when I link through to the details:

I get a fairly good picture of who's looking at what, and for how long. And I can see more details about my viewers:

as well as being able to see where people came from (note that internal hits show the "Real" name of my site, while external and direct-entry visits show my CNAME:

and finally, a nice graphical representation of my 'leverage' (the number of pictures a visitor looks at):

So, for me, this is a baseline as to what I really want to know. Yes, being able to see which pictures get looked at most often is useful, but for my purposes, not as useful as knowing who showed up, and how much stuff they looked at.

And as Tina intimates: the easiest short term solution for this is probably to make it opt-out... and my prediction is that the people who will opt-out are the 'pros' in the audience, whether they have Pro accounts or not. And, as you suggested (onethumb, I think it was), some people with more complex sites -- and I propose to be one of them -- will need a solution that permits them to integrate the stats they get from Smug with stats from other parts of sites, on other engines and servers. So, for that crowd, it doesn't matter how right you get the internal logging, because we need you not to break our external logging anyway.

But maybe it's just me.

So many things are just me. :-)

***MOD EDIT, replaced the large images by smaller ones***

jww · January 15, 2007

onethumb wrote:

Can you define "recently"? What granularity do you care about? And does this "recent" data expire, or can you get access to it at any time?

For example, if you wanted to find out what the most popular images were on Dec 25th, 2006 between 6:00pm and 6:05pm, can you? Is functionality like that important to you?

Do you care about all referrer URLs, including SmugMug and/or your custom domain? Or only non-SmugMug domains?

Great feedback, most of which I'm already tackling.

One big, huge, issue for me that I'd love answered is:

What would you rather have: great image stats or great page stats? Or do you need both?

Don

For me image stats are more important, but I have grown very fond of Statcounter and how it works from and can tell quite a bit from just page load urls.

Statcounter provides the ip's, any referring link, as well as the url of what they were looking at. Not just that I had 4 hits to that size of image.

Did they come from a forum? Or had my card and went their directly as well as how many returning visits. I can tell if a person is just browsing an event, or looking for THEIR car, as well as which one perked their interest. It also shows me the referring url so I can tell if they revist, just visited, and where they found the link. i.e did a buddy send them it or did the discover it themselves.

..and after awhile, I can recognize the ip's and see what events interests them and if they end up in any of the other galleries outside their particular event.

If smugmug tracks images in the same mannger they currently do by adding one to an image tally, well.. that's good, but doesn't really tell me much. Especially if they have previously looked at it (already in cache) and Smugmug takes the same approach and doesn't consider that as a hit. True it dilutes the hit count ratio of first views, but what I get to see with statcounter is folks going back to look at the same photo during that session as well as a return visit.

I first started statcounter as just a backup to the existing smugmug stats... Then I became addicted to all the extra stuff Statcounter that I can figure out from everything it gives me.

..so it isn't just that they brought up the image.. It's how they got there, the chain of what all they looked at, how long the visit, how many returning visits, key word and search engine stats, and more.. This is why I use statcounter and upped my Log Quota to 10,000.

I'm hoping this might give you another perspective on stats usage... Not saying that what I do is right or wrong or for that matter, even makes any sense... it is just what I do with it!

Hope this helps!

ivar · January 15, 2007

Imageinc wrote:

my apologies for the size of these screenshots; I forgot how hi-res my laptop panel is

Hi Imageinc, and welcome to dgrin

I've edited your post, and replaced the ridiculously large images with more normal ones. Please resize your images to an easier-to-view size next time

if you have any questions, please let us know. See my signature for how to do most anything around here.

Cheers,

BistiArt · January 16, 2007

A Very Useful Tool to Answer "How Did People FIND Me?"

onethumb wrote:

This stuff is like gold. Thanks.

You say "gallery stats and image stats" but I really think you want more. Your info about wanting to know about people liking /popular is evidence of that.

I'll get back to you when I have something more substantial built into SmugMug, since I think it only makes sense that we provide rich tools and data to our customers, but until then, we've got a JavaScript hook coming any minute.

Stay tuned...

Don

Good morning, All!
I suspect that for many Smugmug users, this thread and prompt reactions of Smugmug staff will become extremely important.
I'm in the process of developing a customized set of galleries. Just a little fooling around showed me my construction hits make a big portion of my current stats. So, I can't use the stats for future promotional tactics which work most effectively.
I think jfriend's provocative plea for a stat counter system to strongly aid promotional tactics might be considered an absolute imperative.
Rich56k pointed out the viability of knowing the duration of traffic spikes.
I do not think jww was simply ranting when he mentioned the granularity of the chain of what images viewers looked at. So, perhaps I can rant on...
and then, colourbox summed it up neatly when he indicated the present fallacy created by construction hits as the site is being developed.

I'm keenly interested in developing appropriate promotional tactics to help position the digital image wonder created for the average viewer by the sound and professional viewing aspects smugmug first presents them on screen.
At present, with nav bar operational, smugmug reaches off-site from BistiArt for other promotional material, then provides an evocative link back to me containing personal information regarding my site's purpose.

In the Beta RC1 thread, the recent question was clearly asked,
"When might we expect to be able to use these ideas about RC1?"
May I strongly suggest stat counter be placed on an equivalent priority, because it's user-friendly aspect will help our develop promotional tactics, help determine traffic spikes, give us the granularity of individual traffic stats, and, be a very welcome addition to the power smugmug already represents.

BTW, "When are all these exciting ideas going to be at Our Fingertips?"

devbobo · January 16, 2007

BistiArt wrote:

In the Beta RC1 thread, the recent question was clearly asked,
"When might we expect to be able to use these ideas about RC1?"
May I strongly suggest stat counter be placed on an equivalent priority, because it's user-friendly aspect will help our develop promotional tactics, help determine traffic spikes, give us the granularity of individual traffic stats, and, be a very welcome addition to the power smugmug already represents.

BistiArt,

The statcounter changes have been incorporated I believe, so users only have to add the code as they had in the past.

Cheers,

David

External Statistics (StatCounter, etc) with SmugMug Beta RC1

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