Alamy Measures primer: Understanding Views, Zoom and CTR
Those of you contributing to the Alamy stock library may have started exploring the Alamy Measures screens and may be confused by all the talk on forums about CTR and what it means.
This mini-tutorial is for you.
What is Alamy Measures?
Alamy Measures is a statistical recording tool that is still in beta mode (i.e. still being tweaked by Alamy). It was released by Alamy to its contributors to enable them to see the search terms used by buyers. If you are a contributor, Alamy Measures will show you the search terms used which have resulted in your images being viewed by the customer. It records zooms on your image thumbnails and sales linked to that search term. It shows your CTR % and how popular your images are compared to others’.
It will display stats from 2nd March 2007 (the earliest date on which stats were collected) to the current day. The date range is selectable and there are some preset options like “this month”, “last month” etc else you can select a custom date range via the calendars on the main screen. In this example below (click for larger screenshot) the date I’ve chosen is from the earliest date available until the date of capturing this screenshot (8th May 2008), so I’m using the full range of data available for example only. You can choose whichever dates you prefer.
What if there is no data showing in my Alamy measures at all?
If this is the case you may be a new contributor with very few images and you have not yet registered any views or zooms. Be patient and concentrate on adding content so you will get some views and then your statistics will be recorded in Alamy measures.
The Pseudonym Summary screen looks like this (click to enlarge):
PP note: obviously I’ve blurred my account pseudonyms here…!
Each column can be sorted in ascending or descending order by clicking on the column name itself. This screenshot shows I’ve sorted by most views.
So what do each of the columns mean?
Pseudonym
There is one line which lists each of your pseudonyms (the names you sell under). If you have more than one pseudonym you will see more than one line. If you only have one pseudonym (i.e. your name) then you will only see one line here. I have six pseudonyms for my collection of images at Alamy so I see six lines here. Why I have six pseudonyms will be covered another time!
Your Views
The number of views your images under that pseudonym have received. A view is registered when a customer sees one of your thumbnails on a page of search results. The deeper the customer searches the more views will be registered.
i.e. If your top image is on page 7 of the search results and the customer only searches down to page 5 you will record zero views as your images will not have been seen by the customer.
Your Zooms
A zoom is registered when one of those thumbnails served under the “views” column is clicked on (i.e. enlarged - hence “zoomed”) to show the larger image preview screen.
Your CTR (%)
Your CTR % means “Click Through Rate percentage“. This measures the percentage of your images viewed that were zoomed.
It is calculated using the following formula:
Zooms divided by Views multiplied by 100 and rounded up to two decimal places.
i.e. for my first pseudonym (the top line) for the date range selected we get 760 zooms divided by 45,026 views which gives us 0.016879136. To get the % we need to multiply that figure by 100 and round that up to two decimal places which gives my CTR % of 1.69 for that pseudonym.
The more Zooms you get the more Sales you may make. The more zooms you get compared to Views, the better (higher) your CTR %.
But remember it is Sales that you want. CTR % alone is not the deciding factor in whether you are good or bad, far from it. CTR % does count toward your Alamy Rank.
Finally, at the very bottom of this screen you will see the following:
Total Views for XXX (where XXX will be your account name regardless of your pseudonyms)
Total Zooms for XXX
Average CTR for XXX
This, as it suggests, adds (if you have more than one pseudonym) your total views across all pseudonyms; your total zooms across all pseudonyms and displays them. It uses the same formula as above (Zooms / Views x 100) to calculate your Average CTR % across all pseudonyms.
Next up is to explain the individual Pseudonym screens.
PP
