31 zooms, only 3 sales...what am I doing wrong?

[wiskerke]

3 minutes ago, Kamira said:

My original question when I began this thread was why I was getting zooms but so few sales. My CTR is not bad. I have 33 zooms.now. Maybe the reason is people buy my images elsewhere. Maybe I have to wait a little longer to see the results.

 

That would be very easy to test, because you can see views; zooms and search terms here. So if you see those here, and see sales elsewhere of the same images, you'll know.

If you do, please let us know.

 

wim

[Ed Rooney]

Karel, the 2nd image in your port is NOT the library here in Liverpool. It's the Liverpool World Museum. The library is the smaller building next door. 

 

[Kamira]

18 minutes ago, Ed Rooney said:

Karel, the 2nd image in your port is NOT the library here in Liverpool. It's the Liverpool World Museum. The library is the smaller building next door. 

 

Thanks Ed. I'll fix it.

[Chuck Nacke]

5 hours ago, Kamira said:

Thanks Chuck. I really appreciate your point of view.

 

However I still don't like the idea of being exclusive at any agency. I respect your experience but I've been doing this for 12 years and so far I've had great results.

 

I don't know why but at the beginning I never uploaded to Alamy . In the few months since I began uploading here my income here is less than 1% than what I've made elsewhere. I can't be exclusive at Alamy with those numbers.

 

I like Alamy's business model but the competition is fierce and.no agency (in my opinion) is safe. I prefer to have options

 

I don't do current news . I saw your portfolio and is great. I love your work.

 

My original question when I began this thread was why I was getting zooms but so few sales. My CTR is not bad. I have 33 zooms.now. Maybe the reason is people buy my images elsewhere. Maybe I have to wait a little longer to see the results.

 

Thanks again for your help

Kamira,

 

Something for you to keep in mind, Zooms can happen a long time before the license (sale if it is RF) is reported.  I will tell you that I have been around, just getting out of an agency, library, that I have been with for over 25 years.  While I have been close to leaving Alamy twice, I have not.  What you do with your images is up to you, I am old school and prefer to know who is licensing my images, not just spread them around.  I was just telling you what I believe based on my own experience.  I also said more than ten years ago that I was finished photographing demonstrations and current events, Mr. Trump changed that. 

 

I also disagree with those on the forum that it is about the number of images that you have online, in my opinion it is not.  It is about the quality, uniqueness and the accuracy of your IPTC information (Captions and keywords).   

 

Thanks for your kind words about my work.

 

Chuck

[The Blinking Eye]

13 hours ago, wiskerke said:

 

As I said it's about emotion. It should convey what you felt and why you took that image.

Some will argue it's easier to shoot a cause that's not your own others to shoot every cause as if it's your own. My take on that is that it very much depends on your personality. Anyway I'm not seeing a detached gaze here. 😁 So you owe it to your subject to present it as best as you can.

 

wim

 

I don't believe in objectivity~ My photos are a form of personal expression and emotion drives impact. I feel so lucky to have these photos now to remind me of the thrill of that unforgetabble moment!

 

[wiskerke]

1 hour ago, The Blinking Eye said:

I don't believe in objectivity~ My photos are a form of personal expression and emotion drives impact. I feel so lucky to have these photos now to remind me of the thrill of that unforgetabble moment!

 

That's what I thought. 😃

 

wim

[MariaJ]

Hi Kamira,

Most of my alamy sales this year are of images I uploaded in previous years.  It can take a while before someone is looking for what you have in your portfolio.  As has been mentioned, keywording is very important.  Always include plurals of objects, even if there is only one in your image.  For example, if someone was looking for an image of "antique vehicles in Cuba", they wouldn't find your nice image 2D4MRM0 of an antique car in Havana, because you only have the singular "vehicle" in the keywords.

 

Maria

[Kamira]

2 hours ago, MariaJ said:

Always include plurals of objects, even if there is only one in your image.  For example, if someone was looking for an image of "antique vehicles in Cuba", they wouldn't find your nice image 2D4MRM0 of an antique car in Havana, because you only have the singular "vehicle" in the keywords.

Thanks  for your help Maria. Are you sure about the need to include plurals? The search engine should not need that. Someone also mentioned the search engine differentiates between upper and lowercase keywords. It shouldn't do that either.

[Harry Harrison]

4 hours ago, Kamira said:

Are you sure about the need to include plurals?

Alamy's search doesn't do what is called as stemming, so plurals need to be entered separately.  See James Allsworth's article here:

 

https://www.alamy.com/blog/tagging-images-on-alamy

 

There is some psychology involved in predicting just how people search also. For example, you have a landscape photograph so you keyword/tag it 'landscape', but it is known and can be demonstrated that most people search for 'landscapes'. There are more examples given in various discussions on the forum but often it is good to put in plurals even if there is only a single example in your picture.

Edited November 26, 2020 by Harry Harrison

[gvallee]

6 hours ago, Kamira said:

Thanks  for your help Maria. Are you sure about the need to include plurals? The search engine should not need that. Someone also mentioned the search engine differentiates between upper and lowercase keywords. It shouldn't do that either.

 

The search engine definitely does not include plurals, this was changed years back by Alamy.

The statement about lower/upper case is incorrect. There is no difference. It's easy to test. Do a search in upper case in the search box, then lower case for the same search. It will return the same results.

[meanderingemu]

9 hours ago, Kamira said:

Thanks  for your help Maria. Are you sure about the need to include plurals? The search engine should not need that. Someone also mentioned the search engine differentiates between upper and lowercase keywords. It shouldn't do that either.

 

 

of course it should differentiate,  if customers are looking for children, given them a bunch of choice with One Child creates noise, waste of time and potential them looking elsewhere.  

 

 

 

capitalisation has no impact on most search, "ottawa protest" "Ottawa protest" "ottawa Protest" "ottAwA pRotest" give the same number of results.  The one case so far 

[meanderingemu]

5 hours ago, Harry Harrison said:

 

 

There is some psychology involved in predicting just how people search also. For example, you have a landscape photograph so you keyword/tag it 'landscape', but it is known and can be demonstrated that most people search for 'landscapes'. There are more examples given in various discussions on the forum but often it is good to put in plurals even if there is only a single example in your picture.

 

 

but most of what you call psychology is actually research.  Alamy is actually great at providing tools through AoA for this information

 

for example in past month "Landscape" was used in 401 searches, "Landscapes"  17

 

 

note: one of the Landscapes search was for "newzealand landscapes"  which provided enough hits to client to zoom twice and possibly not actually try again writing new zealand with a space.  Note to people with images from the land of plenty.

[Harry Harrison]

27 minutes ago, meanderingemu said:

but most of what you call psychology is actually research

But those 17 will have been searching within 773,634 images as of today, instead of 8,935,374 images for 'landscape', I think it makes sense to include both as the uninitiated might think "I'll search for some landscapes". Also just in case anyone actually uses the Alamy 'Browse by category' page then your image won't appear in the 'Landscapes' category unless it is keyworded (or captioned) accordingly. The exception to this is some of the few unknown number of curated images that are put up the front of that category by Alamy themselves. Of course we also have an unrelated  'Landscapes' category in the optional tab as well, not clear for whose benefit though.

[meanderingemu]

1 minute ago, Harry Harrison said:

But those 17 will have been searching within 773,634 images as of today, instead of 8,935,374 images for 'landscape', I think it makes sense to include both as the uninitiated might think "I'll search for some landscapes". Also just in case anyone actually uses the Alamy 'Browse by category' page then your image won't appear in the 'Landscapes' category unless it is keyworded (or captioned) accordingly. The exception to this is some of the few unknown number of curated images that are put up the front of that category by Alamy themselves. Of course we also have an unrelated  'Landscapes' category in the optional tab as well, not clear for whose benefit though.

 

 

but as i said to me this is all this is about research with the information available, not psychology.  

 

I wouldn't consider knowing you need to also tag "Newzealand", 15 searches in last month, 8 resulting in Zooms as psychology.  

[Harry Harrison]

20 hours ago, meanderingemu said:

but as i said to me this is all this is about research with the information available, not psychology.  

Right, but given your research would you caption as both 'landscape' & 'landscapes'? I think it's both psychology and research actually, psychology to think of how people might be searching for your image and research to see if they actually do, landscape/landscapes is of course just one example, bearing in mind that presumably none of us want to spend very long doing any of it then both terms would seem sensible. You're not going to get a poor CTR if someone searches for 'landscape' and finds your image of 'landscapes'. Other terms are more ambiguous, tree & trees perhaps, does everyone who searches for 'trees'  only want to see pictures of more than one tree? I'd say yes if they were an experienced picture researcher but not necessarily otherwise.

Edited November 27, 2020 by Harry Harrison
CTR not CRT

[spacecadet]

4 minutes ago, David Pimborough said:

 

Not to mention Aotearoa 😄

No searches this year...........or was that your point?

[gvallee]

23 minutes ago, David Pimborough said:

 

Not to mention Aotearoa 😄

 

1 search during the current year for 'Great Fleet in Aotearoa'

[spacecadet]

6 minutes ago, gvallee said:

 

1 search during the current year for 'Great Fleet in Aotearoa'

Oh right, I forgot the %s.

Better put that in my image of the pouwhenua sculpture in Wellington. Which has already licensed without it!

[spacecadet]

26 minutes ago, David Pimborough said:

 

Well seeing as newzealand and New Zealand were the topic I thought it no harm to add the Maori name to the discussion 😆

They call this Aotearoa as well😀

[wiskerke]

 

wim

edit: for a total sum of $205 gross 😁

Edited November 30, 2020 by wiskerke
total sum

[spacecadet]

10 minutes ago, David Pimborough said:

 

Made with real Tuataras   I always liked Tui myself

 

Our flight was very late so they just let us in the first class lounge for a few glasses of forgetting whatever the problem was.🍷

Tui, a couple of those and the entire bar sounded like a mad aviary anyway😎

[meanderingemu]

4 hours ago, David Pimborough said:

 

Made with real Tuataras   I always liked Tui myself

 

 

Made with real tuis?

[Pawel Piotr]

Hi, 0.54 CTR is quite low in my opinion. I guess it just takes time for images to appear in searching engines like google. Mine started to appear but I have only 0.6 CTR and no sales (probably due to amount of images). Just continue to upload like me and be patient. Best, P

[Cal]

1 hour ago, Pawel Piotr said:

Hi, 0.54 CTR is quite low in my opinion. I guess it just takes time for images to appear in searching engines like google. Mine started to appear but I have only 0.6 CTR and no sales (probably due to amount of images). Just continue to upload like me and be patient. Best, P

 

It's just a smidge below the alamy average. I don't think the alamy system is as simple as low CTR = low alamy rank = low search placement. Throughout the summer my CTR was abysmal and though it has started to slowly improve now, it's nothing like the numbers when I was newer to alamy (likely due to luck as I sold the same image twice) which at one point was over 2. I have noticed that images I have in a certain category are far higher placed than others, some near the top of the search. It has helped further, in my case, if that particular image has sold.

 

We mere mortals will never know what goes into the secret sauce of the search engine but the bottom line is I don't worry about my CTR anymore as despite it being very low currently it has not affected sales.

Edited December 9, 2020 by Cal

[Marianne]

@Kamira

 

The link between zooms, CTR and sales is not always as clear-cut as you'd think. For example, my CTR was well above average for a good stretch of time stretch during which I had my worst sales record ever in over a decade here. Eventually it dropped to an abysmal level for a few months so I was surprised when, last month, when my CTR was still abysmal, my sales shot up significantly, with only one image similar to one that sold having been zoomed out of all my sales. I've had months where quite a few of my images are the only ones zoomed out of 100 or more images in a search, yet months later, none of them have been licensed (and this is for images not available elsewhere) and other months like November where zooms and CTR are below average and sales are strong. I'd note that half of last month's sales were of places well covered by Alamy so placement presumably was good despite my low CTR. And a couple were available elsewhere - though ironically it would cost more for certain uses at a particular micro than here. 

 

Did you have 31 zooms this month (in which case I'm surprised you had so few sales) or 31 in the past 6 months? The later would  be extremely low.

 

How many views are you getting? This also gives you a sense of whether your keywords are working. Is it consistent month to month, are views growing steadily as your portfolio grows? During the timeframe when my CTR was above average but sales were bad, I noticed a drop in my average views for some months while recently views are nearly back to a more normal level. This certainly affects sales. 

 

Edited December 9, 2020 by Marianne
I made a mistake and corrected it