hit counter

[willjoe86]

I dont know if this has been brought up, but how about having a hit counter on each individual homepage? Its just hard to tell exactly how much traffic is coming through with the picture hit counter/stats, which can be kinda vague...

Will

[Barb]

I dont know if this has been brought up, but how about having a hit counter on each individual homepage? Its just hard to tell exactly how much traffic is coming through with the picture hit counter/stats, which can be kinda vague...

Will
You may want to try this for a hit counter. It's a wonderful free service and very configurable. Also, it gives you so much information. It's great!

http://www.statcounter.com

[willjoe86]

You may want to try this for a hit counter. It's a wonderful free service and very configurable. Also, it gives you so much information. It's great!

http://www.statcounter.com
I was actually thinking that maybe smugmug could incorporate a hit counter into everybodies homepage....

But idk, is there a way for the basic customers to incorporate some kind of hit counter code?? I dont think so, but who knows.....

[jfriend]

You may want to try this for a hit counter. It's a wonderful free service and very configurable. Also, it gives you so much information. It's great! http://www.statcounter.com
I just signed up for statcounter and put it in my smugmug page. Thanks for the recommendation. It's pretty neat functionality. We'll see how interesting the data it reports is over time.

--John

[rainforest1155]

John,

We'll see how interesting the data it reports is over time. for me the reports are only useful if I can check them every day, because only the last 100 hits are shown in all statistics. On the other hand it's free, so I can't complain.
It's just fact that e.g. the resolution/browser stats are totally useless with looking at the last 100 hits. I would like to see this feature set expanded to at least 1000 and keep the visitor paths/referrer data limited to 100.

I guess I'll mail them my idea.

Sebastian

[jfriend]

John,

for me the reports are only useful if I can check them every day, because only the last 100 hits are shown in all statistics. On the other hand it's free, so I can't complain.
It's just fact that e.g. the resolution/browser stats are totally useless with looking at the last 100 hits. I would like to see this feature set expanded to at least 1000 and keep the visitor paths/referrer data limited to 100.

I guess I'll mail them my idea.

Sebastian Yeah, they are probably trying to get you hooked with the free account so you'll buy access to a longer history (it's available as a for-pay option).

--John

[willjoe86]

ok im trying to put the statcounter code into my smugmug bio and it doesnt seem to work (i used the html only option...). Nothing is showing up. Has anyone else had any luck with this??

[jfriend]

ok im trying to put the statcounter code into my smugmug bio and it doesnt seem to work (i used the html only option...). Nothing is showing up. Has anyone else had any luck with this??
First of all, I think you want the code in ALL your pages, not just the page your Bio displays on. With it in all your pages, you get a ton more information about unique visitors, how many pages they each viewed, etc...

I used the invisible JavaScript version and put it in my header and it worked first time. I haven't tried the plain HTML version which offers a lot less functionality.

--John

[Barb]

ok im trying to put the statcounter code into my smugmug bio and it doesnt seem to work (i used the html only option...). Nothing is showing up. Has anyone else had any luck with this??
I'm not sure how much HTML you can actually use in your Bio. Just place it in your header or footer and you should be all set :)

[JamesJWeg]

With statcounter uou only get stats from galleries opened, not from direct links right?

James.

[jfriend]

With statcounter uou only get stats from galleries opened, not from direct links right?
James.
You get stats from all smugmug pages loaded and viewed. This includes people who don't come in through the front door of the gallery, but land on a smugmug page from a link they were passed or from a search hit.

But, you are correct that you will not get stats on direct image link because that is only retrieving an image from smugmug and does not load a smugmug HTML page and thus has no ability to hit the statcounter infrastructure. If all you want is image hits from direct links, smugmug has pretty decent stats on it's own for that and theirs do include hits from direct linking.

--John

[JamesJWeg]

You get stats from all smugmug pages loaded and viewed. This includes people who don't come in through the front door of the gallery, but land on a smugmug page from a link they were passed or from a search hit.

But, you are correct that you will not get stats on direct image link because that is only retrieving an image from smugmug and does not load a smugmug HTML page and thus has no ability to hit the statcounter infrastructure. If all you want is image hits from direct links, smugmug has pretty decent stats on it's own for that and theirs do include hits from direct linking.

--John
But SM doesn't tell you how hit it.

James.

[jfriend]

But SM doesn't tell you how hit it.
You're right. The way Statcounter works is it embeds something in your page and counts the hits from that embedded thing. It then uses cookies and referrer info to make some sense of the hits (where they came from, unique visitors, sessions for one visitor, etc...). There is no way for it to do any of that with a direct link since there's no way for it's web servers to get involved. That would have to come from Smugmug since only their web server sees that info.

If you have N different locations you were posting an image (ebay, dpreview, yahoo, etc...) and wanted to keep track of hits from each different location, then you could just make N copies of the image on Smugmug and hand out a different URL to a different copy of the image to each destination. That would let you see how many ebay hits there were and have those separate from dpreview, but still wouldn't give you the more detailed info that statcounter provides.

--John