Promoted beyond my competence!

[andremichel]

On 31/10/2019 at 22:15, Bill Brooks said:

Forget CTR the most important measure is V/S. That is Views divided by sales. How many views do you have to have, to make a sale?

 

If the figure is low then your images are great, and your keywording is also great. If the figure is high then you are wasting the clients time as well as your own.

Another crucial factor in this ratio is similars or the number of variations of the same subject. 

Edited November 3, 2019 by andremichel

[John Mitchell]

I think that this metric, interesting as it is, might be flawed in several ways. For instance, my guess is that contributors with large collections are going to tend to have higher V/S ratios than those with small and "average" sized portfolios. It's virtually impossible for sales to keep pace with views if you're a prolific uploader (e.g. Jeff G.), even if you're a super-duper keyworder. Something else to consider is that views can lie dormant for some time and result in sales down the road.

Edited November 3, 2019 by John Mitchell

[Marianne]

On 31/10/2019 at 18:15, Bill Brooks said:

Forget CTR the most important measure is V/S. That is Views divided by sales. How many views do you have to have, to make a sale?

 

If the figure is low then your images are great, and your keywording is also great. If the figure is high then you are wasting the clients time as well as your own.

 

So take the number of views for a year, and divide by the number of sales in that year. What is your V/S 200? 400? 800? 10,000?

 

V/S may be the secret sauce in the Alamy calculation. It should be anyway.

 

I think these kinds of pronouncements can be very discouraging and also misleading. At least, in my experience, this metric isn't helpful at all. Here's why:

I've had over 14,000 views since January with only 1,100 images. People with over 4,000 images are reporting fewer views than that. Perhaps this is why my views/sale ratio is quite high. I don't know, but I don't think it means my keywording is bad, nor that I am wasting buyer's time. I think it shows that I'm uploading images that buyers can use and keywording them properly. 

 

My number of sales dropped to a little over 1 per 1,000 images per month this year, to 13 sales or one sale for every 82 images over the year. For the past two years, my average was one sale for every 52 images, per year. I think that sales per image is a much more valuable metric.But, even that can be misleading, because despite a drop in sales, I earned as much in the first 6 months of this year as I did in all of 2018, when my sales per image was much higher.

 

Allan said the average is one sale a month per 3,000 images, so one sale for every 250 images. If this is the case, then my sales numbers are above the Alamy average. I know that my CTR is above average, particularly in my primary pseudo where it varies from 0.8 to 2.0 this year, so, in comparing my results via these other metrics, my portfolio is performing fine, despite the fact that my views/sales ratio is extremely high (above 1500). 

 

I shoot travel and tend to go back and shoot in the same locations, so I may have a large number of views for a particular location, giving buyers a nice selection to choose from. For the most part, I don't have a lot of similars, and have a tightly edited collection. I could easily have 10s of thousands of images online if I didn't edit tightly (and if I did more bulk processing), but I usually pick the best 8-12 out of every 300 images I shoot. That doesn't mean they are all winners by any means, and I'm blown away by people with 2,000-5,000 images who sell many times more images than I do.

 

The point is, metrics can be misinterpreted, so it's easy to make pronouncements that don't really hold up. 

 

BTW, what is your views/sales ratio? You didn't say. How about sales per image? I have no doubt it's better than mine, but I'm curious. 

Edited November 3, 2019 by Marianne

[Autumn Sky]

Although metrics have their value & can serve as indicators,  I think all of them should be taken with grain of salt. 

 

One metric I'd like to see is search term that resulted in sale.  Not CTR which we have now -  95% or more never ends as sale anyways (for me at least), so except for keyword adjustments because of "false positives" I don't think there is much value in it.   But actual sale is black on white.  Some micros actually provide this, so it can't be that hard.

[Marianne]

11 minutes ago, Autumn Sky said:

Although metrics have their value & can serve as indicators,  I think all of them should be taken with grain of salt. 

 

One metric I'd like to see is search term that resulted in sale.  Not CTR which we have now -  95% or more never ends as sale anyways (for me at least), so except for keyword adjustments because of "false positives" I don't think there is much value in it.   But actual sale is black on white.  Some micros actually provide this, so it can't be that hard.

 

Yes, this can really be helpful. I used to study this a lot with the micros since it also meant I had 1000s of sales to look at and could see which keywords worked best. I think that really helped me to refine my keywording. I still have lots of images at Alamy that have more keywords than necessary, especially from the old three-part AIM, but it is not worth the time to revise them. 

[Ognyan Yosifov]

1 hour ago, Marianne said:

 

I don't agree.

I've had over 14,000 views since January with only 1,100 images. People with over 4,000 images are reporting fewer views than that. I don't think that means my keywording is bad, nor am I wasting buyer's time. I think it shows that I'm uploading images that buyers can use and keywording them properly. 

My number of sales dropped to a little over 1 per 1,000 images per month this year, to 13 sales or one sale a year for every 82 images. For the past two years, my average was one sale for every 52 images. I think that sales per image is a much more valuable metric.

Allan said the average is one sale a month per 3,000 images, so one sale for every 250 images. If this is the case, then my sales numbers are above the Alamy average. I know that my CTR is above average, particularly in my primary pseudo where it varies from 0.8 to 2.0 this year, so I don't think I'm wasting buyer's time, yet my views/sales ratio is extremely high (above 1500). So, I don't think that metric is really very valuable, at least not on its own. 

I shoot travel and tend to go back and shoot in the same locations, so I may have a large number of views for a particular location, giving buyers a nice selection to choose from. I don't have a lot of similars, and have a tightly edited collection. I could easily have 10s of thousands of images online if I didn't edit tightly, but I usually pick the best 8-12 out of every 300 images I shoot. That doesn't mean they are all winners by any means, and I'm blown away by people with 2,000-5,000 images who sell many times more images than I do, but it's easy to make pronouncements that don't really hold up. 

 

BTW, what is your views/sales ratio? You didn't say. How about sales per image? I have no doubt it's better than mine, but I'm curious. 

Same here, Marianne. I have a lot of views for the 1500 images in my port, but not that many sales and my CTR is at the Alamy's average. But I know the reason for that. I live in a popular, but VERY small town, surrounded by a VERY popular "National Park" and 95% of my pictures are shot locally. And I'm just SHOCKED how poor the searches are for that area. I've never seen any specific searches, but only general ones and since there are thousands of results showing up with every search, the searchers just give up after 100 or 200 views without even a single zoom. It's a miracle how I have sales at all. The people who make many sales with small ports just travel a lot and have very tight edit from every trip, they do... 

Edited November 3, 2019 by Ognyan Yosifov

[John Mitchell]

1 hour ago, Ognyan Yosifov said:

Same here, Marianne. I have a lot of views for the 1500 images in my port, but not that many sales and my CTR is at the Alamy's average. But I know the reason for that. I live in a popular, but VERY small town, surrounded by a VERY popular "National Park" and 95% of my pictures are shot locally. And I'm just SHOCKED how poor the searches are for that area. I've never seen any specific searches, but only general ones and since there are thousands of results showing up with every search, the searchers just give up after 100 or 200 views without even a single zoom. It's a miracle how I have sales at all. The people who make many sales with small ports just travel a lot and have very tight edit from every trip, they do... 

 

Yes, while it's true that we can waste clients' time by keywording images poorly, clients can (and often do) waste our time by using vague search terms. For instance, a quick look at Alamy Measures (AoA) today shows a search for "guatemala" and another one for "scotland". These are going to result in all kinds of wasted views, and there are oodles of these types of searches every day.

[meanderingemu]

6 hours ago, John Mitchell said:

 

Yes, while it's true that we can waste clients' time by keywording images poorly, clients can (and often do) waste our time by using vague search terms. For instance, a quick look at Alamy Measures (AoA) today shows a search for "guatemala" and another one for "scotland". These are going to result in all kinds of wasted views, and there are oodles of these types of searches every day.

 

but i regularly get multiple refinement searches in my results so maybe most of these are acceptable to clients.   it does however overstate views, if you happen to hit on all of them.  

[Bryan]

6 hours ago, John Mitchell said:

 

Yes, while it's true that we can waste clients' time by keywording images poorly, clients can (and often do) waste our time by using vague search terms. For instance, a quick look at Alamy Measures (AoA) today shows a search for "guatemala" and another one for "scotland". These are going to result in all kinds of wasted views, and there are oodles of these types of searches every day.

 

Yes I suffered at the hands of a search for "County Durham" the other day, 500 views resulting in 1 zoom! 

 

It makes you wonder whether or not to include the broad geographic area when keywording locations.  I'll wonder for a few seconds and then continue as before.

Edited November 4, 2019 by Bryan

[Marianne]

10 hours ago, Bryan said:

 

Yes I suffered at the hands of a search for "County Durham" the other day, 500 views resulting in 1 zoom! 

 

It makes you wonder whether or not to include the broad geographic area when keywording locations.  I'll wonder for a few seconds and then continue as before.

 

Yes, I've had sales for vague searches with thousands of other photos showing up - so you need to include those terms or your photos may never be found. I can get a couple hundred wasted views for "England" from images tagged "New England" but it's a common enough search from which I've had sales, so have to take the good with the bad. 

Despite so many views, I think my sales numbers are pretty good by Alamy standards for the size of my portfolio, if anywhere from one in 53 to one in 83 of my photos sell, that's a decent percentage, but I sometimes think perhaps I should just upload many more images from the same locations anyway. It's nice to get a CTR spike when a bunch of images are zoomed. What is discouraging however is when I'll have various images that are the only zooms, and never see a sale from them. Makes you wonder why zooms count so much in rank, but my photos mostly show up well, so I guess it all works out. 

[KevinS]

V/S for past 12 months; 390. For past 3 months, 183. A recent uptick in sales seems to be reflected in those numbers.

[IanDavidson]

V/S is 227 for the year.  I was a little.surprised as 90% of my photos are “Live News” and thus do not tend to get zoomed as often as stock.  
 

I tend to keyword on a minimalist basis as this is often how news photography works. Occasionally I will revisit and add keywords.

[David Olsen]

V/S is 698 for the year.  Sales down from last year about half as many,  revenue down about 20%.

[Stokie]

V/S 658 for the year.

 

John.