Smug Tip of the Week: Viewing Your Stats
Whether you’re seeking total photo-fame or fear peeping toms on your private site, our powerful built-in Stats features help you keep on top of your game.
Find Your Stats
You can view them at any time by visiting your Control Panel in the Stats tab:
… or from inside any gallery by clicking the Tools button and looking under This Gallery:
How to Interpret Those Numbers
We give you 6 tabs across the top that let you see just what’s going on around your site. You can get as general or as specific as you wish, pulling numbers from your whole site or from just one gallery. Don’t forget to adjust the calendar at the top to pick a date range, too. More details.
For simplicity we give you a row of four quick links (“today”, “yesterday”, etc.) across the top so you can get the most-requested date spans with a click:
- Every time an image (or video) is loaded onto someone else’s screen, that counts as a hit. When you’re logged in and view your galleries as the site owner, we won’t count those.
- If you have ever shared the link to an unlisted or passworded gallery with someone, they can continue to generate hits if as long as they have access to the gallery. So if you want to cut them off, add or change the viewing password.
- Views to your photos, hosted from your galleries, will generate hit counts. Lots of them! Remember this if you’ve ever posted an image to an external site like blogs and forums. To foil this, you may want to disable External Linking in your Gallery Settings.
What doesn’t get counted:
- How many times an image was downloaded.
- How many times a video was played through to the end. We do count how many times it was started, and hits to the preview JPG.
Harness Google
For statistical superpowers you can sign up for a free Google Analytics account here. You’ll get a Web Property ID number (Hint: It starts with a “UA” and is followed by numbers and dashes) that you should copy. Paste it into the “External Visitor Tracking” section in your SmugMug Control Panel.
Give it a day or so to start collecting data and get ready to crunch some numbers!
We like pretty pictures, so one of our favorite features that Google offers is the Map Overlay. This shows you from which countries (and towns) your fans are viewing your site:
Dig around and see what other cool features they offer. Don’t forget that while you can check your SmugMug stats at any time at SmugMug, you’ll need to log in at Google to view your Analytics.
Leave a Reply
What is SmugMug?
Gorgeous, unlimited photo sharing for everyone. Grab your own website on SmugMug and be ready to archive, share and print the photos you love. From unlimited photo and video uploads to e-commerce tools for Pros, we have it all. Learn more.
Does Google Analytics work the same as the smugmug stats where when you are logged into your own account, the hits are not counted?
@Jon under your Google Analytics settings there is an option to exclude certain IPs – that’s how analytics does it
I know you said, “Every time an image (or video) is loaded onto someone else’s screen, that counts as a hit.” But just to clarify, if I have a slideshow on the homepage and someone lets it cycle through a complete gallery, each picture will increment by 1 hit? If it cycles through again, will that increment it by 1 again? –Thx
Hi Scott! If your client keeps a slideshow open and running in a window, we don’t count each cycle as a hit. Try this yourself and please let us know if you have any further questions.
There is one problem with Google Analytics and Smugmug: since your urls are random numbers and letters, it is hard to know what gallery or what picture has been seen by visitors…
In SmugMug stats you should see a thumbnail representing which photo it is, for easy identification. You’re right about GA, though, since they only report the secure URL. But you can always copy and paste that into a new tab if you’re not sure of which photo it is. HTH!
Thanks for your answer.
Of course I could copy/paste the url, but it is doesn’t help to compare the various charts given by GA…
Any solution?
Is there any chance you might add a comparison feature. I know I’d like to compare two or three galleries to each other simultaneously – just by using different colored lines.
Thanks for the great suggestion, Jane! If you don’t mind, could you add it to our feedback forum here?
http://feedback.smugmug.com
Right now your best bet would be to open two tabs in your browser and bring up the stats for different galleries in each one. Thanks for bringing up a great idea that I’m sure other Smuggers would love to see, too.
Does Google analytics only track pageviews and not image views they way smugmug currently does? so if someone clicks on a photo it tracks it in Smugmug but would GA track that as a view or only if the user goes to another page?
Hi dgstage, I’m not sure that we completely understand your question. We do provide view counts in your SmugMug stats, and similarly Google Analytics should record info every time someone clicks an image in your gallery. But it sounds like you may be looking for more detailed info than that. Would you write in or chat with our heroes? http://help.smugmug.com/