Goin' down slow?

[Inchiquin]

Yes, exactly the same for me. CTR 2.0 in August, steadily downhill to 0.50 now.

 

Also, unless there's a sudden flurry of sales in the last week, this year will see a drop in sales after 8 years of continuous growth. I'm not entirely surprised by this, though. As I've only uploaded fewer than 200 pics in the last couple of years while the Alamy collection has swollen by millions, I'm lucky to be doing as well as I am.

 

Alan

 

[John Richmond]

Fairly even for me.  December figures only up till the 22nd so there could be a few more before month end.   Month Zooma Views CTR Jan-20     91 8228 1.11 Feb-20      81 7254 1.12 Mar-20     72 7393 0.97 Apr-20     62 6013 1.03 May-20     66 6492 1.02 Jun-20      89 7406 1.20 Jul-20     175 9420 1.86 Aug-20     71 6445 1.10 Sep-20     68 7220 0.94 Oct-20     74 6570 1.13 Nov-20     62 6342 0.98 Dec-20     52 4860 1.07

[Alex Ramsay]

Pretty consistent for me - 1.06 last January, 1.08 now, with the lowest point being 0.66 in April

 

Alex

[Allan Bell]

Mine are all over the place so not much help really.

 

Jan 0.75

Feb 0.45

Mar  0.81

Apr 0.00

May 0.17

Jun 0.57

Jul 0.45

Aug 0.44

Sep 0.74

Oct 0.28

Nov 0.47

Dec 0.78

 

What I have noticed is that when the CRT goes up my Views go down. May not be the same for everyone though.

 

Allan

 

[meanderingemu]

Obviously this is a small sample, and not statistically significant, but @Alamy do you have any internal data in your analysis based on Contributor location?  Not asking to share, just curious if this is something you have found of impact.

[Cal]

14 hours ago, Bryan said:

Following a pile em high and sell em cheap philosophy, my CTR is normally well below the mean, and at the start of the month it really plumbed the depths, but is has now recovered to its normal sub mediocre standard. Meanwhile sales have been better than average during both Nov and Dec. Doesn't pay to get too het up over CTR.

 

I am in a similar position to you and my experience tells me the same regarding not worrying too much about CTR. Since the summer my CTR has been particularly low, averaging around 0.25 in Oct, Nov and Dec. I don't think my low CTR at the moment is due to any downturn in the market but rather due to certain captions/tags I have (that are necessary) that are resulting in a lot of false positives. In one example I have the name of a canal which is named after three towns. Unfortunately that means that certain searches for those towns are turning up these results, which obviously don't get zoomed. In this case, having a fairly high search placement is counterintuitively resulting in a low CTR! Despite that sales are on a positive upward trajectory.

[spacecadet]

16 minutes ago, Cal said:

In one example I have the name of a canal which is named after three towns. Unfortunately that means that certain searches for those towns are turning up these results,

Phrase tagging means that they will appear lower in single word searches. This is supposed to mitigate the effect.

 I did say "supposed to", but I find in general it does work. A bit.

Edited December 23, 2020 by spacecadet

[MizBrown]

39 minutes ago, spacecadet said:

Phrase tagging means that they will appear lower in single word searches. This is supposed to mitigate the effect.

 I did say "supposed to", but I find in general it does work. A bit.

Alamy takes single words out of captions and probably out of phrase tags.   I saw a lot of Central Park, NY, showing up on a search for Central America, where Central was often the only thing to hook onto (most used USA or US).  Also, some shots of central places in South America showed up, and not because of keyword spamming.

[Cal]

50 minutes ago, MizBrown said:

Alamy takes single words out of captions and probably out of phrase tags.   I saw a lot of Central Park, NY, showing up on a search for Central America, where Central was often the only thing to hook onto (most used USA or US).  Also, some shots of central places in South America showed up, and not because of keyword spamming.

 

I think it does, yes, but I would be inclined to agree with SC's view that phrase tagging can mitigate false positives. I've just been and checked the images of mine in question and I've mostly used phrase tagging, which makes sense as it'd be silly for me to put the three single towns it's named after as tags. So really I can't help that, but whoever made those searches must have dug deep as they don't appear high up in searches for those place names.

 

Phrase words can be useful but sometimes I overuse them and then have to go back and put more single words in to cover a range of phrases. Coincidentally going back and doing that has at times tipped a few of my images into the green visibility, not that we use that as any kind of useful measure.

Edited December 23, 2020 by Cal

[John Mitchell]

9 hours ago, MariaJ said:

 

Mine is following a similar trajectory John.  Sept-Dec  my CTR has been .52, .53, .49 and .25 for this month.  Lowest in over a year, and not a sale yet this month.

 

Sorry to hear that, but it's interesting to hear that you're seeing a similar pattern.

 

P.S. See my comment below re false positives and possible (?) search engine changes.

Edited December 23, 2020 by John Mitchell

[John Mitchell]

5 hours ago, Cal said:

 

I am in a similar position to you and my experience tells me the same regarding not worrying too much about CTR. Since the summer my CTR has been particularly low, averaging around 0.25 in Oct, Nov and Dec. I don't think my low CTR at the moment is due to any downturn in the market but rather due to certain captions/tags I have (that are necessary) that are resulting in a lot of false positives. In one example I have the name of a canal which is named after three towns. Unfortunately that means that certain searches for those towns are turning up these results, which obviously don't get zoomed. In this case, having a fairly high search placement is counterintuitively resulting in a low CTR! Despite that sales are on a positive upward trajectory.

 

Interesting observation re false positives. I wonder if some search engine tweaking has been going on during the past three months. My CTR has sunk to 0.22 today, and many of my images have "British Columbia" in their keywords, which must result in a lot of false positives -- i.e. "British" everything. However, this doesn't seem to have been a problem in the past.

[MizBrown]

1 hour ago, John Mitchell said:

Interesting observation re false positives. I wonder if some search engine tweaking has been going on during the past three months. My CTR has sunk to 0.22 today, and many of my images have "British Columbia" in their keywords, which must result in a lot of false positives -- i.e. "British" everything. However, this doesn't seem to have been a problem in the past.

 

Searching your portfolio for Central America gets a lot of the Central Library in Seattle and Pacific Central Railroad.   You do have "America" as a tag on one but just "North America" for the railroad photo taken in Canada.

 

[MizBrown]

A search for "Among Us" which appears to be an on-line computer game pull one of mine from the Shenandoah National Park of dead snags among the green.  I have nothing in the caption or keywords that gives me a clue how my photo was included in the search results. 

 

Edited December 23, 2020 by MizBrown

[Inchiquin]

1 hour ago, MizBrown said:

A search for "Among Us" which appears to be an on-line computer game pull one of mine from the Shenandoah National Park of dead snags among the green.  I have nothing in the caption or keywords that gives me a clue how my photo was included in the search results. 

 

 

"Us" is probably one of those 'insignificant' words that are ignored in searches. So the search is just looking for "among".

 

Alan

 

[John Mitchell]

2 hours ago, MizBrown said:

 

Searching your portfolio for Central America gets a lot of the Central Library in Seattle and Pacific Central Railroad.   You do have "America" as a tag on one but just "North America" for the railroad photo taken in Canada.

 

 

Tough to avoid overlaps like those. Also probably not enough images (about 20 all told) to make much of a difference to CTR. I'll go back and clean some of those up. Thanks for the info.

Edited December 23, 2020 by John Mitchell

[Colin Woods]

My December CTR is very high, which is odd as this december is my worse month since 2016. For me the zoomers are active but the buyers are staying away in droves.

[MizBrown]

1 hour ago, Inchiquin said:

 

"Us" is probably one of those 'insignificant' words that are ignored in searches. So the search is just looking for "among".

 

Alan

 

 

Apparently, that's correct.  Adding "video game" gets the right thing,  Pokemon, and some people out shopping.

[Marianne]

"New England" brings up a ton of false positives for "England" for me, but it also has led to sales so I just can't worry about it too much.

 

 "Central Park" has ended up in searches for Central America for me too. I guess I could delete "America" from all those images but is that really the answer?

 

I spent ages changing tags years back to add quotes around phrases which Alamy never implemented, and when they switched to the new AIM a few years ago I ended up with single words suddenly repeated several times since the new AIM split up all my phrases. Fixing this type of glitch would improve the Alamy search but honestly I'm not interested in re-keywording yet again. I try to put important phrases as supertags and hope for the best but the number of false hits I get on keywords that I can't avoid is pretty high. 

 

I had six sales in November - and a seventh on S - despite an abysmal CTR from September through November - so I can't sweat it. This month one sale and a decent CTR. 

 

Edited December 24, 2020 by Marianne

[Keith Douglas]

My CTR has been between 0.4 and 0.8 this year and I can't see any obvious correlation between the higher CTR months and subsequent sales. Even less obvious is what to do to increase my CTR, other than cutting out keywords to reduce Views. For example I have about 400 images with the tag "godmanchester", because that's where I used to live. Some are "of" Godmanchester, but many are "In" Godmanchester. If someone searches for "godmanchester" and then just scrolls through hundreds or thousands of images without zooming on any (including mine) then it has a negative impact on my CTR. I've seen this with other searches.

 

I've pretty much been treading water this year, with just a couple of hundred images uploaded in 2020. The question for me is how many hours of effort do I put in to try to increase my CTR and how much will that increase sales? If I work out the effective hourly rate of doing so and then compare it with other alternative sources of income (not photography related) the potential returns just don't stack up for me. 

[Stokie]

My figures:   Jan 0.50 Feb 0.68 Mar  0.36 Apr 0.64 May 0.46 Jun 0.50 Jul 0.83 Aug 0.49 Sep 0.77 Oct 0.79 Nov 0.72 Dec 0.88 So CTR the highest so far this year.   At the moment sales are the second highest this year, and revenue is the second lowest.   John.

[Sultanpepa]

Not so much dropped like a stone this month rather just hasn't got off the ground. Sitting at 0.22. 😟

[spacecadet]

Thought I had an Eve sale today, but it was only a refund and relicense on microscopically different terms.

Sherry beckons. Merry Christmas one and all.

Edited December 24, 2020 by spacecadet

[Allan Bell]

1 hour ago, spacecadet said:

Thought I had an Eve sale today, but it was only a refund and relicense on microscopically different terms.

Sherry beckons. Merry Christmas one and all.

 

Who is Sherry?

 

Oh! sorry I get it.

 

Allan

 

[John Mitchell]

18 hours ago, Colin Woods said:

My December CTR is very high, which is odd as this december is my worse month since 2016. For me the zoomers are active but the buyers are staying away in droves.

 

Quite the opposite for me, ten sales so far this month, none of them zoomed as far as I can tell. Only nine zooms for the month. I've had more than that in one day. CTR evaporating.

 

No rhyme or reason, but could be a lot worse... 🙄

 

Happy holidays to everyone. ✨

[Marianne]

8 hours ago, Keith Douglas said:

My CTR has been between 0.4 and 0.8 this year and I can't see any obvious correlation between the higher CTR months and subsequent sales. Even less obvious is what to do to increase my CTR, other than cutting out keywords to reduce Views. For example I have about 400 images with the tag "godmanchester", because that's where I used to live. Some are "of" Godmanchester, but many are "In" Godmanchester. If someone searches for "godmanchester" and then just scrolls through hundreds or thousands of images without zooming on any (including mine) then it has a negative impact on my CTR. I've seen this with other searches.

 

I've pretty much been treading water this year, with just a couple of hundred images uploaded in 2020. The question for me is how many hours of effort do I put in to try to increase my CTR and how much will that increase sales? If I work out the effective hourly rate of doing so and then compare it with other alternative sources of income (not photography related) the potential returns just don't stack up for me. 

 

I had over 100 views for "Westchester County" (where I live) in one search, no zooms so bad CTR but 2 sales in one day that were quite obviously a direct result of that search. Views have been down this year, so I'm reluctant to remove any relevant keywords simply because they might negatively affect my CTR since it rarely correlates to sales for me.