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AlamyMeasures (beta) is live!

Permalink Comments (60)26 November 2007 at 15:43 by James West - CEO
Posted under Rambling CEO

AlamyMeasures (beta) provides information about how your pseudonyms and images have been performing in the search engine since March 2007 (this was when we started collecting data for this tool). This is a 'beta' version, which means that feedback from our contributors is required before we can be confident that we have presented the information in a useful and meaningful way. We anticipate that some changes will be necessary, as well as more detailed explanatory notes, before we release version 1.0.

Use AlamyMeasures to get an overview of which searches have had your images included in them and how you measured up against the competition when you were seen. Be careful not to jump to too many conclusions however – we will be providing more guidance on how to interpret this data at a later date.

You can get to AlamyMeasures under the 'Organise images' section of 'My Alamy'.

Please note that our Member Services team are not able to help you with questions regarding this tool. We would, however, still like to hear your suggestions and feedback so please use the comments section of this post to express yourselves!

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Add your own commentComments (60)

  1. 26 November 2007 at 16:27 Alan Oliver

    Hours of fun ahead I can see. Thanks for this tool which I am sure will be invaluable when we figure out all the nuances and it is fine tuned. First observation - my Psuedonym summary seems to show only four sales in the period on the basis of views, zooms and click throughs when in reality there were in fact over fifty for this particular psuedo? Having said that I have only been playing with it for a few minutes so I dare say I am not interpreting it correctly yet?

  2. 26 November 2007 at 17:53 Bob croxford

    What seems to be missing is the number of images downloaded, which ones they are, and reasons why they are not on sales reports.

    Fancy taking so much trouble on something which does not affect the bottom line.

  3. 26 November 2007 at 18:04 Dan borzynski

    I took a quick look through the information and saw some interesting combinations of keywords and image results I never anticipated when doing my keywording. A search for "fur" and "stole" resulted in some furry squirrels eating stolen papaya, but I suspect what was being looked for was a clothing accessory instead. Some of these will have to be changed!

    This should be quite useful for me.

    Dan Borzynski

  4. 26 November 2007 at 18:17 Jaybee

    First impressions:

    Sure this will be useful once the parameters are defined. i.e.

    "Views". Actually placed on a page physically looked at by the buyer or returned on a lower page (on a huge search) but not viewed by the buyer?

    "Sales". Seem to be 90% of sales missing and I can see the searches that led to them. Does AM report only sales searched for by customers direct? Do we assume that other sales are from Alamy staff lightboxing?

    Its going to show very well where the search engine is throwing up keywording anomalies.

    Like Bob, I'd love to see downloads. What images of mine have "left the building" and what was the search. This will help chase unpaid stuff to as we'll know what to look out for.

    The CTR figure reported seems incorrect and a manual calculation shows the errors (using your formula of zooms/views * 100)

    Look forward to it developing though...

    Jaybee

  5. 26 November 2007 at 18:20 Steve

    Well Done Alamy - a good positive step.

    Plenty of data to think through for me.

    Cheers

  6. 26 November 2007 at 18:31 Genevieve vallee

    Well done Alamy, this makes a very interesting analysis and will be very useful to determine trends, etc.

    However, I am suspicious of some results seen:

    beaver = 4,962 total views
    BEAVERS = 2,390 total views

    Plurial or upper case should not make any difference. Current result using either word is consistent (2,861 hits).

    Also, I have no sales registered at all, which fortunately is not the case.

    Cheers
    Genevieve

  7. 26 November 2007 at 18:37 Jenny Tonkin

    I think it looks really useful so far, certainly makes you think about searches. BUT, could we have a bit more information about how it works please? I'm thinking in particular about the number in brackets behind your name and how you access your pseudonyms or are they all bundled under one name?

    Over all though, well done.
    Jenny

  8. 26 November 2007 at 19:06 photomamp

    Well done Alamy!

    WOW... There is a lot of info to see and it's just started... great.
    I haven't had yet a wide control of the info to help you in suggestions, but if you keep on this way, I'm sure it will be very helpful (at least, for me).
    Congratulations and thanks!

    Miguel Angel Muñoz Pellicer

  9. 26 November 2007 at 19:07 Alan gallery

    Already I have made changes to Keywords from the information that I seem to have the same issue as Alan Oliver in that only a few of my sales are appearing. This may be a general issue. In the case of images that have sold there does on appear to be a view for them either.

    It would also be good to be able to go from an image in Manage Images to the views, zooms and sales for that image.

    Thanks for this set of tools.

    Alan Gallery

  10. 26 November 2007 at 19:11 Tina manley

    I, too, would like to know which images have been downloaded. And, like the others, my sales are not showing up.

    Thanks,

    Tina

  11. 26 November 2007 at 19:15 Jeff Greenberg

    I would like to know that none of the buyers who determine our AlamyRank are also contributors as this would open door to sabotage of our CTR%?

    regards jg

  12. 26 November 2007 at 19:31 Brian

    Looks like this tool could be good once it has been tweeked.
    Number of sales recorded don't match actual sales. What is the number shown after pseudonym on home page? If it is the total images on file for that pseudonym then it is also incorrect. Why does the CTR figure differ from home page to that at the foot of other pages?

  13. 26 November 2007 at 19:48 Simone

    I've tried this tool with Firefox 2.0.0.8 and nothing at all happens when I hit the Go!- Button. I've tried to enter various different dates, however still nothing happens, no Feedback nor a comment, just nothing. Has anyone run into the same problem?

  14. 26 November 2007 at 21:54 Joe

    I'm all for putting more information in the hands of the contributor, but, ike Jaybee above, very few of my actual sales seem to be reflected on the list. I've had six sales this month, but not one of them is shown on the list.

    If less than 10% of actual sales are shown on the list (as seems to be the case for me too), how much help can it really be?

  15. 26 November 2007 at 21:57 cristina

    Also for me nothing at all happens when I hit the Go! button even if I change the dates.

  16. 26 November 2007 at 22:35 Phil

    Thanks for this tool.

    It would be good however if we could click on any of our chosen images and get some of the stats info that way. Then with images that have been viewed several times we could easily see how many times the same image has appeared under different search phrases.

    Good stuff anyway.

  17. 26 November 2007 at 22:46 Bill brooks

    Very useful. It will allow me to better manage my Alamy business.

  18. 26 November 2007 at 23:05 Oleksiy Maksymenko

    Less than 5% of sales for me. It's a pity if it affects our rating and the sales number is not correct.
    Great tool, though! Thanks a lot Alamy, such a nice Christmas gift for us :)

  19. 26 November 2007 at 23:53 Clive Rowley

    This is quite something, as others have outlined above. Certainly quite a few of my sales have not been recorded. Also I have had sales which appear never to have been picked for the zoom view.

    But, errors or omissions excepted, this is the sort of feedback which can only help contributors. I was amazed how few potential buyers seem to specify RF or L in their searches.

    Thanks, Alamy, and I look forward to further development and elucidation.

  20. 27 November 2007 at 03:01 Stan rohrer

    Looks like a fantastic tool. Needs some fixes (or I do not understand the provided counts). In my AlamyMeasures stats is a search for "dayton" which shows 1 for my views and 24 for total views. A normal Alamy search has 1315 image hits for "dayton" and I have 184 images in my portfolio. Seems like a problem.

    Similarly for "chevrolet", AM shows my views at 62 and the total views at 918. A site search returns 3788 images and I have 168.

    Also I do not see any sales as noted above.

    Also I would like the PREV and NEXT added to the page numbers at bottom right.

  21. 27 November 2007 at 06:41 Gary Cook

    Great tool - but a couple of suggestions for addtional information which I feel would be really useful :-

    1. Information on search terms that resulted in non of your images in the search results. This may highlight keywords that customers are using which the contributor didn't think of but are relevant to their images, and would also be useful in analysis of where our collecion is weak.

    2. Information on how many times a particular search term has been used rather than just an agregated number of views. For example this would help in judging whether one customer used the term "libya" and looked through many pages resulting in thousands of views, or are those thousands the result of several different searches, each viewing only a few pages?

    Thanks,
    Gary Cook

  22. 27 November 2007 at 07:16 Oleksiy maksymenko

    I think it needs another combined sorting method. Where it's sorted by the lowest CTRs and at the same time with highest numbers of views.
    Something like this:
    CTR 0.00; Views 1000
    CTR 0.00; Views 500
    CTR 0.00; Views 300
    CTR 0.01; Views 1000
    CTR 0.02; Views 2000
    CTR 0.02; Views 100
    etc.

  23. 27 November 2007 at 08:12 Tony

    Nothing happens for me either when I hit go, change dates, or anything.

    Possibly because I'm a new contributor with only 6 images on here!

    Perhaps Alamy could communicate a bit better though if they do not have data for newer contributors or those with <50 images etc.

  24. 27 November 2007 at 08:34 Mario Ponta

    Thank you for the tool: interesting reading.
    I realize searches are carried out using french keywords as well.

    But the list of the Pseudonyms is not updated: my last created pseudo with my best pics don't show, while an old one (with no pics at present) is still there.

  25. 27 November 2007 at 09:24 Olaf

    Keep up the good work! This is a brilliant tool and much better than expected after the brief introduction some months ago.

    Please keep the pace regarding issues like watermarking, reliability of distributors or ergonomics of the 'my images' section.

  26. 27 November 2007 at 11:22 Tony Lilley

    Thanks Alamy,
    Alamy Measures is a brilliant and very useful addition for contributors.
    It has already help me to change keywords and discover mistakes I had made in the past.

    Best wishes, Tony Lilley.

  27. 27 November 2007 at 12:21 Andrew Paterson

    The data very quickly becomes information overload but it gives a very good insight into the search terms that are being used and how buyers are thinking, but this is also showing up some failings in the search engine. I have one view for the search "Julie Andrews" which is being matched from my name and an image of an event captioned as taking place in the month of July.

    Can AlamyMeasures be incorporated into My Images so I can click on one of my images and see it's Views/Zooms/Sales history?

  28. 27 November 2007 at 12:33 Michael Griffin

    It is good as far as it goes, but we need more general information about buyer searches.

    If a hundred buyers are all looking for RED DOG and no matches are found, no photographer will ever know that it's being looked for and the buyers will go else where.

  29. 27 November 2007 at 12:51 Darryl Webb

    A useful tool, it just goes to show that getting your keywords right is a constant task.

    This should be very useful once we all get used to it. It's good to see that Alamy continue to develop tools that improve success for themselves, the contributors and the customers....even if some whinge about the work that's involved in the new features 8-)

    Like others, I'd like to point out that only a small number of my recent sales show up in the tool.

  30. 27 November 2007 at 12:53 Alex segre

    I think it would be really useful now to be able to open a batch of images together (eg 30 at a time as in Manage Images) so as to easily remove a keyword.

    At present if I see a glaring mistake resulting in lots of views and no zooms I have to open them one at a time which is very laborious.

  31. 27 November 2007 at 18:54 Brian Tolbert

    The new Measures tool can be a very valuable tool for fine tuning of keywords, both for we photographers and especially buyers if they receive a more accurate return on their images seaarches.

    The above suggestion to be able to open a batch of images at once would be especially useful to those of us looking to fine tune keywords. You could also make such a batch action even better by allowing us to append(add)or remove keywords to groups of images via this batch action. This would also be a great feature in helping to update things in the Manage My Images section.

    The suggestion to show keyword searches that returned NO images would help to fill weak areas of the collection.

    Would also like to know which images have been downloaded and/or might currently be in lightboxes.

    All in all a very good addition to a great stock site. Thanks and keep up the good work.

    PS: How much longer until the big push into the North american COMMERCIAL market?

  32. 27 November 2007 at 20:45 Paul collis

    I've scrolled through 60 pages (@20 keywords per page) and can find no mention of any sales, despite having about 30 between March 2 and today. OK, so it's BETA and glitches are to be expected.

    But, is it really of much use to us? Isn't it time-consuming enough to have to deal with the new non-IPTC-friendly annotations? Or the ridiculous 2nd guessing of 'property release required?'. And the fact that there is no 'editorial use only' button instead of the current 25-step torture to 'de-commercialize' an image?

    Sorry, but I can do without wading through these non-essential tabulations ; I'd rather Alamy concentrate on who's downloading and who's not paying, while I concentrate on getting my keywords right in the first place.

    Maybe Alamy should consult a group of pro snappers before they initiate their next software project.

  33. 27 November 2007 at 21:17 Jeff greenberg

    What if qualified buyer works at home & rest of family makes habit of looking at all the cool thumbnails** on Alamy?

    **mostly mine

  34. 27 November 2007 at 22:55 Suzanne long

    AM is only counting clicks from a subset of buyers, therefore it is probably only counting sales from these buyers. I guess that's why only a few sales are shown.

    If this is the case, it indicates that the vast majority of my sales and click-through activity come from buyers that are not being tracked by AM.

    Does this decrease AM's usefulness?

  35. 28 November 2007 at 12:24 philip scalia

    Fantastic. I particularly like the "Yesterday" feature. Now, about that batch management....
    Phil Scalia

  36. 28 November 2007 at 12:47 Gary were

    Well done guys! How many other libraries provide this much feedback to contributors?

    This could be a great tool for contributors and therefore Alamy. Tips on how to read and interpret the data would be useful. Missing sales info clearly needs to be sorted; mine also under reported.

    Keep on refining!

  37. 28 November 2007 at 14:14 Paul F

    There are some terms after search words that aren't explained eg [L] and [pT], what do these mean?

    Also the capitalised version of a word and non-capitalised appear as two seperate keywords.

    I'm guessing that the location of a keyword may be what is causing these differences, a guide to this would help.

    A good start to a useful feature and already I can see where many irrelevant searches are occuring which will help me make my keywords more accurate.

  38. 28 November 2007 at 14:45 Chrissie

    @ Paul (no 37)

    The terms are explained fully if you click on the 'Alamy Measures Help' link shown clearly on your Alamy Measures page. There you will find L = Licensed and Pt = Portrait.

    :)

  39. 28 November 2007 at 20:57 Jon Lewis

    Wont work for me whatever date range I try.

  40. 29 November 2007 at 00:33 Jeff greenberg

    Would like annotation serving same function as NOT in search engine, such as NOT "South American" for my many images that have both SOUTH and AMERICAN keywords but were taken in US.

  41. 29 November 2007 at 09:08 Mario Ponta

    Hi,
    Some tuning is badly needed, although the tool looks already good.
    My main pseudo doesn't show at all. Sales are not there for other pseudos.
    I've mailed to Member Service but there is no answer.
    Thanks

  42. 29 November 2007 at 19:18 Richard

    AM is good but the search engine is rubbish. How can you rank someone based on its outcomes. Alamy measures shows this up clearly. For example, a search for "Cliff Richard" turns up my images which have the keyword cliff, presumably because my name is richard. Therefore my rank is immediately hit. There are many other examples of this being shown by AM.

  43. 29 November 2007 at 21:24 Paul Collis

    Yes, Richard, #42.
    Excellent point. For the last 6 months I've been telling Alamy that my name is Paul Collis. Enter it in the search bar and you get my images PLUS over 100 snaps of collie dogs. 6 in the first 2 rows. I didn't take them. Most of them aren't stellar, and they're right up there at the front of the search. In my Alamy Measures, 1st entry, number one keyword search, is 'collies in car' with 331 views. They have absolutely nothing to do with me.
    Alamy, how hard can it be to differentiate collis from collie? Or to exclude the names of photographers from image searches? Please concentrate on basic, popular requests (see #32 on this blog) before embarking on additional software experiments. Thank you.

  44. 30 November 2007 at 10:09 peter davey

    Like this - good tool.
    Couple of points, My Sales don't show up in the data.
    On the Excel Download it would be good to have a date against the key word, that way I can download a chunk of data and trend it by month.

    Currenlty I'd have to download each month each time then repeat the process.

  45. 30 November 2007 at 15:40 Garry delong

    I must be missing something. I cannot understand the value of CTR.
    In fact, to me, it seems worse than useless, actually being
    misleading. Consider the following scenario:

    Alamy accepts an image of mine of Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris. I
    keyword the image with only one keyword: "cathedral." Any person who
    finds the image with that sole keyword is most probably looking for a
    photo of a cathedral and the CTR is likely to be quite high. Now
    suppose I keyword the image with "cathedral, church, Notre Dame."
    Those who want photos of a certain American Catholic university will
    not zoom my photo and the CTR will fall. The designer who is looking
    for an image of a little American country church is not going to zoom
    my photo and the CTR will fall even more. Now tell me, which is the
    better set of keywords for Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris?
    cathedral
    or
    cathedral, church, Notre Dame
    ?

  46. 30 November 2007 at 15:42 Sue Clark

    I just returned from an extended trip to Europe and found Measures. It will be an excellent tool. I'm curious why my sales do not show and why an image that did sell does not show as a zoom.

  47. 30 November 2007 at 18:27 Stephen power

    The "Yesterday" aspect of Alamy Measures of is excellent and will allow contributors to keep track of what is "hot" in their collections.

    I also think that there is huge scope for tweaking keywords based on searches that do not result in views or zooms.

    I have been discouraged by what I perceived as heavy-handed zero tolerance in QC - and it kept me away from making regular contributions for a while. But Measures (and good sales in November) has given me a bit more encouragement to continue with submissions.

  48. 02 December 2007 at 15:21 Mike

    Reply to Gary, post 45

    Hi Gary. I think we need to start thinking more like researchers, who would be unlikely to putin just Cathedral, and get 108,070 images. They might put "Derby Cathedral" and get 17 or, in your scenario, "Notre Dame Cathedral" and get 2359. If I was a researcher, I'd just put in "Notre Dame" (8103) then add Paris outside of the quotes (2359)... and those are the only keywords I would put in as the photographer. It's unlikely that you'd miss a sale by not including Cathedral. It's unlikely that a researcher would just put in Paris on its own. And you'd stand a better chance of being both seen and clicked. No system is going to be foolproof, but I'm starting to think that less is more. Good luck.

  49. 03 December 2007 at 11:18 Jaybee

    Mike, Post 48: "but I'm starting to think that less is more"

    AM is showing up a lot of incredibly bad searches. I would have thought qualified buyers would search with a bit more relevance.

    Recent ones of mine include "Woman UK", "Chateau" and "Food shop"..

    Tell me how you're supposed to keyword for those! Completely loose wide and what did they think they would get!

    I can only hope that AR is not adversely affected by this. I suppose we're ALL affected by this sort of wide wild search activity though.

    Pre the last keyword changes we had one field and had no control over unlikely combos occurring. Now we have three fields and I've upped the number of keywords now we can include phrases.

    It would seem folly if we now have to pair these right back or use 90% "exact matches" to protect our AR from poor searching.

    I had always assumed qualified buyers and picture researchers would use more descriptive searches at first then get wider if the results were few. Seems not from what I'm seeing on AM.

  50. 03 December 2007 at 12:09 SallyR

    AM is showing up some flaws in the stemming scripting. A search on <Nativity schools> brought up 6 of our images of native (!) animals with handlers and schoolkids.....no chance of a CTR there...

    AM also demonstrates some pretty casual/lazy researching techniques by clients - using 3 or more words to define searches would be more beneficial. Educating researchers (and photographers) in the art of Annotation Tools (once implemented by the search engine) will probably result in more accurate searches & positive AM rankings.

  51. 03 December 2007 at 15:09 Phil Scalia

    It would be helpful to know how a client refines their search. Also, which searches resulted in sales, even if they aren't my sales.

  52. 04 December 2007 at 13:36 Stephen cooper

    Any chance the export to excel could be changed to work with Macs. It might be to do with the aspx page it's trying to run.

  53. 04 December 2007 at 14:49 Phil scalia

    Stephen,
    Mine is working fine. Mac OS 10.4.11, Excel 2004, Firefox.
    Phil

  54. 04 December 2007 at 16:39 Jeff greenberg

    Would like a function that allows "qualified buyers" to suggest keywords for photos which can either be approved or deleted by contributor.

  55. 04 December 2007 at 23:03 Jeff

    Post #13, 15, 23

    I agree with Tony - probably because we're new contributors. I have 9 images and have been here only since Nov 4th, and nothing shows up on the page.

    It would really be nice to know what the cutoff is. Otherwise you get a bunch of confused people posting in the blog. =)

  56. 05 December 2007 at 00:40 Stephen Cooper

    Ta Phil,

    Think it might be my lack of Excel for the Mac. Was hoping it would've download a XLS file so either iWork or NeoOffice could read it. Still it's not the end of world I have a PC somewhere!

  57. 05 December 2007 at 08:42 Bernie olbrich

    PLEASSE ALAMY: I'd really appreciate a quick summary from you dealing with many of the points above.

    eg.
    i) Why don't all the sales show?
    ii) Has only a subset of the historical data been used in this Beta version?
    iii) Is there an error in the CTR calculation.
    iv) Why don't capitalized and lowercase searches give the same number of views as in the Beaver/BEAVER example

    Thank you: I really like the idea of having more info on how customers use the site, but as yet I don't understand enough about how I will apply it to my data.


  58. 05 December 2007 at 12:22 Phil scalia

    I'm concluding that sales are not showing because they were made by the sales staff rather than keyword searches.

  59. 05 December 2007 at 14:56 Jeff

    Re: 13, 15, 23, 55

    Cool - something now shows up for me today. No keywords, just total views/clicks for my Pseudonym - it's a start!

    Thanks!

  60. 05 December 2007 at 16:16 cristina

    It's working also for me now!

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