Change in Image Hit Statistics

17 June, 2016

ArtWanted.com Staff
952 Views
15 Comments

Change in Image Hit Statistics

As we worked on redesigning the new website, one of the items we reviewed was the way we recorded statistics hits. After reviewing how we did this in the past, we decided to make several changes to improve the accuracy and clarity of the statistics recording. These changes may have affected the number of hits/views you are seeing in your statistics reports, so here is an explanation of what was done...

Currently, we only record an image “view” when the large version of that image is displayed at its full resolution. To clarify, this is the page that shows the title of the artwork in the page header, information about the artwork and artist and comments about that artwork.

In the past, we would record an image “view” anytime that image was seen, no matter what the size or where on the website it showed up. This means that we recorded views when the image showed up as a small random image, your artwork store, image voting pages, special holiday sections, featured images, the “larger images” view of your main portfolio page and other areas of the website. The artist slideshow would also rack up a lot of hits for images, even if not all of the images were viewed by the website visitor.

With the new website, we felt it was better to only record a hit/view to the statistics page when someone is viewing the full image in all its glory, even if that change reduced the total amount of individual hits on your statistics reports. Your images are still being seen in many other areas of the website, just not getting recorded in your stats reports like it used to be. No other changes were made to the tracking of the hits to your portfolio or portfolio tab pages.

Overall, we have seen an increase in hits and website visitors since the new website launched. We have also seen many more hits to the portfolios of our members since the launch of the new site. If you have noticed a drop in your image hits, this is most likely only a dip in the statistics reporting charts, but the actual number of people viewing your images has not likely changed.

We created this graph from our analytics data to show a comparison of "pageview" hits from the old and new websites on three critical pages. The main artist portfolio page is getting twice the pageviews on the new website, compared with the old site. The timeframe comparison is May 1-15th (old site) and June 1-15th (new site).

We are confident that we will continue to have more hits and website visitors going forward as new artists join each day and through our increased marketing efforts for ArtWaned.com

15 Comments

Anthony M. Benjamin 19 Jun 2016

I like the old way better, my website views has shifted from over 1000 views a month to less than 3 so far this month.

getting the views on Artwanted was the highlight of my day and art career.

now your have taken away one of my only source of joy..

your are surely loosing my support

ArtWanted.com Staff 22 Jun 2016

We do understand the joy of logging in and viewing a bunch of hits, we all want that, right? However, we feel that it's better to display a more accurate number of people viewing the large image in your portfolio than recording hits for small thumbnails or hits to images that are really never seen by a person. We hop you can appreciate this in time, thanks.

ArtWanted.com Staff 28 Jun 2016

Yes, this is correct. Any view to the large image is considered a hit/view to that image, so a "hit" is recorded. Automated robots and website scans are ignored, so just real people looking at your artwork trigger a view.

marie-claire gallet 09 Aug 2016

I don't trust the number of visitors we might have. The first month after the "handover" I had noticed a CONSIDERABLE increase of them. Finally I saw that each time I clicked on MY image, I had a new visitor llllll When I added the number of views and comments, I don't understand how I have been able to reach such a score ............ MIRACLE !!!!!!!!!!!!

ArtWanted.com Staff 11 Aug 2016

Marie-Claire - From all of our testing and checking, the numbers that show are accurate on your stats reports.

We DO record a hit of your are viewing your own artwork, so take that into consideration as you are looking at your own portfolio then look at your stats reports.

You are getting some great traffic to your portfolio and images, so as long as 95% of the hits are not from you, you should be happy with the visitors looking at your artwork.

Valora Abbett 06 Sep 2016

I really like this overall, but I don't think you should include us looking at our own portfolios as that is not an accurate stat then. I like to check everything after I upload it and I really believe it should never count. I only want to see organic traffic to my page and portfolio.

ArtWanted.com Staff 07 Sep 2016

Valora - Thanks for your feedback. Before we made any changes to our stats, we did a lot of research on what other websites and statistics platforms were doing.

We concluded that almost all other stats platforms record the hits/views from the member/owner of that site. This is even true with Google Analytics, which powers statistics for an estimated 30-50 million different websites.

Because of the data we found, we do record the stats of all users, including the owner of the site on our reports. If you frequently rack up a bunch of hits looking at your own portfolio, you will just need to remember to adjust for that when reviewing your numbers.

annie steele 18 Sep 2016

New is always a challenge to learn. Some times new is a happy thing, some not. But it makes me use our (my) brains a little bit more. The new look is clean and bright easy to use. At 72 years easy is nice. I take pictures because the world is full of the most amazing stuff. Colors and shapes in the strangest places. l m so glad Art wanted is here.

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17 June, 2016