Flickr’s pro account enables a stats feature which in turn will give you a huge breakdown of the happenings of your photos. What I’d like to know is if the Flickr Stats matter to you? Do you check it daily, weekly, monthly? Ever? Did you know it existed?
It is a cool feature but since I don’t use Flickr as the main source to promote my work I don’t pay much attention to it. In fact, from what I understand most people who view photos on Flickr stay on Flickr and rarely venture off to a persons website.
However, when you get into the nitty-gritty, it has some cool Google Analytics type tools
- View Counts today, yesterday and all time
- Referrers today, yesterday and all time
- A full breakdown of Tagged, Geotagged, commented, views, favorited, etc..
Please leave a comment with your thoughts. How do you use the Flickr stats, if you do at all. I’d love to hear about it!
Scott
About Scott Wyden Kivowitz
Thanks for your input Aaron. Does your website get much traffic from Flickr or do you find most people staying there?
No, I don't see very much traffic flow from Flickr to my website. I've found Flickr to be much more of a passive effort, getting some work out there that folks will see or I might tweet about. It's definitely not part of any major traffic/sales flow.
Same here. Thanks again for your input Aaron!
I pay attention to my stats, mainly looking at two things: spikes in traffic (if a photo suddenly gets very popular, I'll pay attention to why), and monitoring referrers. With referrers, I'm curious who is linking to me (and also keeping an eye out for use of my photos that might be outside my specified license).
I check my stats every day mostly for the same reasons as Aaron. I also like to see where traffic might be coming from and lastly, I like to know when views drop. I haven't linked my site to flickr or vice versa so at this point I don't have traffic from it but given the different purposes of the two I don't think much would happen.
I look at them, mostly to see which people have used Flickr's "blog this" feature… the Flickr stats show me my referrers. Sometimes I'm able to convince those referrers to point at my URL instead.
That is a great use James. Thanks for your input!
Thanks for your input Ana!
following referrers is cool – but these days flickr seems like more of a hosting platform than anything else…
This is true Jesse. So I'm assuming you find that people rarely visit your website through Flickr too?
it seems to me that i don't get many referrers to anywhere from flickr. fortunately there are several platforms out there to disseminate your work (twitter, tumblr, posterous, etc) and possibly enhance your exposure, which probably has reduced to some degree flickr's appeal.
Yup, all of those sites are great for exposure. I find myself getting hits from certain Flickr photos that lead to specific correlated blog posts. Other than that I don't see much more.
This is true Jesse. So I'm assuming you find that people rarely visit your website through Flickr too?
it seems to me that i don't get many referrers to anywhere from flickr. fortunately there are several platforms out there to disseminate your work (twitter, tumblr, posterous, etc) and possibly enhance your exposure, which probably has reduced to some degree flickr's appeal.
following referrers is cool – but these days flickr seems like more of a hosting platform than anything else…
Yup, all of those sites are great for exposure. I find myself getting hits from certain Flickr photos that lead to specific correlated blog posts. Other than that I don't see much more.