Traffic Analysis

Richard S · April 30, 2005

Is there anything in the works to let us see which domains are hitting
our albums? I mean which domains, which referers, and which albums
and images are getting the most hits.

Most (good) ISP's just give you access to the raw web server logs and
then you can filter them into a tool like AccessWatch
(http://www.accesswatch.com/sample/).

I would say as smugmug matures this feature will be become essential.
I think it should go along with power and pro accounts. I'd gladly
pay extra for it as a "premium" service.

flyingpylon · April 30, 2005

I would like this as well. Even if it was something where maybe only the last 60-90 days of data was available but you could download it for archive purposes.

onethumb · April 30, 2005

Richard S wrote:

Is there anything in the works to let us see which domains are hitting
our albums? I mean which domains, which referers, and which albums
and images are getting the most hits.

Most (good) ISP's just give you access to the raw web server logs and
then you can filter them into a tool like AccessWatch
(http://www.accesswatch.com/sample/).

I would say as smugmug matures this feature will be become essential.
I think it should go along with power and pro accounts. I'd gladly
pay extra for it as a "premium" service.

Quite a few Power and Pro accounts do this on their own, using external services not part of smugmug.

As for smugmug, we don't have any plans to offer this sort of information. We get hundreds of millions of unique photo hits and billions of page views per month. I still consider us to be a small, young company, so you can do the math on when we're a medium-sized company and are getting hundreds of billions of page views per month.

The amount of disk space and CPU required to store and retrieve that amount of information is pretty enormous, not to mention software engineering time and energy, and it would put a drain on the resources we could otherwise devote to features more of our customers want.

Given that Power/Pro customers can and are doing this themselves and that we rarely hear this request, I think it's safe to say that it's extremely low on our priority list.

Sorry, wish I had better news.

Don

Richard S · April 30, 2005

I see your point.

If you have a Power or Pro account, just put in a harmless link (it
can even be to a transparent single-pixel .gif), as long as the link
is to an ISP account that offers web log access, and problem solved.

Thanks!

PS: For the record the one thing I *really* want you to do is make
templates work in such a way that I can apply them to all my galleries
as a account-wide default, and do this just once so that when I change
the template everything else changes automagically. If you do that
one thing I'll be VERY happy. Everything else takes a back seat to
that.

Cameron · April 30, 2005

onethumb wrote:

Quite a few Power and Pro accounts do this on their own, using external services not part of smugmug.
...
Given that Power/Pro customers can and are doing this themselves and that we rarely hear this request, I think it's safe to say that it's extremely low on our priority list.
Don

Ok - would any other Power/Pro users care to share how they're doing this? I just upgraded to a power account so I haven't spent much time researching my options, but if others have already put a lot of time and energy into finding a good solution, I'd love to hear it.

Mike Lane · April 30, 2005

CSwinton wrote:

Ok - would any other Power/Pro users care to share how they're doing this? I just upgraded to a power account so I haven't spent much time researching my options, but if others have already put a lot of time and energy into finding a good solution, I'd love to hear it.

www.statcounter.com

It's the best in my opinion.

Nikolai · April 30, 2005

Same here:-)

Mike Lane wrote:

www.statcounter.com

It's the best in my opinion.

Free, customizeable and very nice.

flyingpylon · April 30, 2005

Maybe I misunderstood Richard's original post.

I would like to be able to get stats for hits to specific images, not pages or albums, etc. It's not possible to record hits to images using the methods previously mentioned. In addition, those methods won't help you figure out what's going on and who is stealing your bandwidth when someone hotlinks one of your images from a web site, in a forum, or on eBay, etc.

Doesn't sound like I'll get those stats anytime soon, but I'll probably survive.

Cameron · April 30, 2005

Mike Lane wrote:

www.statcounter.com

It's the best in my opinion.

Thanks - you're right it looks great. It's already up and running.

I appreciate the quick reply (Nikolai as well).

Richard S · April 30, 2005

flyingpylon wrote:

Maybe I misunderstood Richard's original post. I
would like to be able to get stats for hits to specific images, not
pages or albums, etc.

No, you understood me perfectly.

I appreciate the point Don was making. The other side of it is that
other people *have* complained about not being able to see, when a
single image starts to get tons of hits, who the referer is. And
making an individual user's http logs (say for the past 30 days)
available thru http, ftp or the API mechanism is not a prohibitively
complex or expensive proposition. It's just a function of time and
resources like anything else. The software tools necessary to process
massive log files are out there and available.

I think over time as smugmug evolves this issue will be solved one way
or another. The "gallery stats" will certainly evolve and provide
more useful and detaled info. I have no doubt about that.

XO-Studios · May 1, 2005

CSwinton wrote:

Thanks - you're right it looks great. It's already up and running. I appreciate the quick reply (Nikolai as well).

Can anyone give me pointers to get statcounter to work. I tried inserting it in the java scripts section, but get a message on top of my page stating code corrupt.

JavaScript is by no means my forte, and I have the impression that it has to do with the copy/paste code having a scripttag in there and SM putting a script tag around that. Anyway can any of the guy's having this up and running tell me where to put the statcounter script, and hat to 'strip' from the create script.

TIA,

XO,

DmitryS · May 1, 2005

flyingpylon wrote:

I would like to be able to get stats for hits to specific images, not pages or albums, etc. It's not possible to record hits to images using the methods previously mentioned.
Doesn't sound like I'll get those stats anytime soon, but I'll probably survive.

I also miss this feature...

Cameron · May 1, 2005

XO-Studios wrote:

Can anyone give me pointers to get statcounter to work. I tried inserting it in the java scripts section, but get a message on top of my page stating code corrupt.

I had the same thing happen -- I put it in with my footer code and it works great. I imagine it would be fine in the header as well.

lenscape · May 1, 2005

Stat Count
I use stat count too. It will give you last 100 hit counts for free.

http://photos.lenscapephotography.com

XO-Studios · May 2, 2005

CSwinton wrote:

I had the same thing happen -- I put it in with my footer code and it works great. I imagine it would be fine in the header as well.

Invisible statcounter code added to header, works like a charm

XO,

igoforit · July 31, 2005

In my case, I added the code to my header.
This means that when people see my pictures via a link in a forum, the counters are not updated. The statistics on smugmug learn me that these are the biggest traffic generators. Is there an easy way to have access to linked images through forums or other websites added to my statistics?

Jos

XO-Studios wrote:

Invisible statcounter code added to header, works like a charm

XO,

Traffic Analysis

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