Flickr Tips 2 – Your Stats

by danperry on March 17, 2008

in flickr

In mid-December of 2007, Flickr started showing statistics for Pro accounts (and for $20/year, why are YOU not a Pro?) There is a lot of good info that you can get from these stats. Definitely not the most robust stat platform I’ve seen, but valuable nonetheless. Let’s dig a little.

To get to your stats, select “You” from the top navigation, then “Your Stats”. There are 5 main items:

  • Daily aggregate Views
  • View Counts
  • Most Viewed Photos
  • Referrers
  • Breakdown of Your Photos

Truthfully, only two of these are very interesting (Most Viewed Photos and Referrers.) It’s nice to see what photos of yours are popular, especially if you’re viewing the stats on a pretty regular basis. Sometimes a picture will get extremely popular, and increase in views by a wide margin in a short period of time. You’ll be able to keep track here.

The Referrer section is the fun one, especially for anyone with marketing running through their veins. You can see by the screenshot that yesterday, Google sent me 6 visitors, Yahoo Image Search sent me 15, etc.

012.JPG
Now for the fun part. By clicking on the Google link, I see that a visitor found my Flickr page by typing in “emerils delmonico steak house las vegas”. It also provides a clickable link, so I can see the result in Google’s SERP. Here’s what it looks like when I click through:

022.JPG

As you can see, my Flickr page is ranked #4 for this query. If that doesn’t get the marketing wheels turning, I don’t know what will. What can I do to take advantage of this? How about writing a review of this restaurant, posting it to my blog, and linking to the post from this image? There are lots of other opportunities as well. (Think of any? Share them in the comments.)

For an additional tip (we’ll call it Tip #2.5), be sure to optimize the TITLE of your image. That’s what search engines pull, and add to your clickable link in the SERP, as shown in the above image. If I would’ve only used “emerils” and “Delmonico” in the Description and/or as tags, I’d never be ranked #4 in Google for the term.

The stats updates once a day, so be sure to check back often. I’ve built it into my daily routine, so I’m checking it daily. This is also beneficial if one of your images gets picked up by a blog, and you don’t know it. You’ll see the name of the blog in the Referrers section.

Hope this helps!

If you like this post you might enjoy following me on Twitter: twitter.com/danperry

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