Things That Don't Get Measured, Don't Get Changed.
I don't know who said it first, but it's a truth that can't be denied. I'm reminded of it every time I ask someone what advertising vehicle they are using is bringing them the most business. The most common response I hear is, "I don't know. We don't really have a good way of tracking that information." So, since it doesn't get measured, it doesn't get changed. Businesses continue to do things they've always done, whether they're effective or not.
Flickr Steps Up To The Stats Plate
So, I was pleased to see Flickr launch their new Stats page. Why? Because if I want to drive as much traffic to my online presence as possible, no matter where it is, I need to know whether I'm achieving my objective. And how.
I want to be able to see if there is a commonality among the photos that have received the most visits in any given time period. I want to take more of the kind that get visits and less of the kind that don't. This is not brain surgery, but it's hard work to figure out which are which when stats aren't available or aren't presented in an easy to analyze format.
Simple To Set Up, But There are limitations.
Setting up the stats is a one click process. That's good, but right now the stats feature doesn't allow you to massage the data very much. For example, you can't see if photos that are geotagged get viewed more on average than those are not. If I knew they did, I'd be sure to spend more time geotagging. And Flickr's stats don't allow you to set your own time frames. But they do give you the ability to see if a photo you thought was interesting yesterday, actually was interesting to anyone. I can see from the stats below that some of mine were not. :)
I'm sure they will be improving on this tool. And I'm sure I'll be trying to improve on my photos.
Flickr is also telling me where the visits came from.
This is at as important, if not more important. If you look at the graph below you'll see I'm not getting much natural search traffic. I have not concentrated on doing a good job with my tags and descriptions. So I'm not surprised by the numbers. But I'm glad I haven't to date. This gives me a chance to play with changing the way I tag and describe the photos and to use them in different ways.
This post is an example. It will be interesting to see the numbers tomorrow, after this post. This is the first time I've ever used flickr to "host" the images that appear in a blog post here on AR. So, it will be interesting to see how many of you click on the photos... especially since I've just alerted you to. :) We'll see how the changes I make impact my numbers.
Knowledge is power. What will you do with the knowledge you gain from your Flickr Photo stats?
Jeff Turner's Photos On Flickr
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