Elias Tzoc blog!

Keeping track of the number of visitors to a site -or collecting data about how these visitors found your site- can be useful for several reasons: evaluating, reporting, planning etc.  After uploading two image collections into flickr -January 2009-, I’ve been checking/comparing two web-stats tools -Google Analytics (GA) for the local CONTENTdm collections and Flickr Stats (FS) for the new flickr collection.

At first, flickr seemed to be the “winner” especially with the level of details (e.g. views, comments, referrers, keywords) provided for individual images.  At that time, there was also a way to view the “all time” stats.  In March, however, flickr made a couple of changes to the stats page.  They added the “so far today” feature which could be useful but they disabled the “all time” stats.  You can read some details and discussion on this page.

…being positive, I hope to see this feature -restored- in the future, because it lets users see/analyze/make decisions based on the accumulated stats.  Even better, FS should let users specify a range of time–just as GA does.

For instance, think about this hypothetical example:

[ view larger image ]

While we cannot really compare these two tools, in the long-term, flickr users will probably appreciate some other enhancements -generate a PDF report, visitors’ location, etc.  After all, FS is part of the $25 annual fee for the pro accounts.

In the meantime, don’t get disappointed …we can still do something:
www.flickr.com/photos/me/stats/refs/thisweek/
www.flickr.com/photos/me/stats/refs/lastweek/
www.flickr.com/photos/me/stats/refs/threeweeksago/
www.flickr.com/photos/me/stats/allphotos/thisweek/
www.flickr.com/photos/me/stats/allphotos/today/
www.flickr.com/photos/me/stats/YYYY-MM-DD/
www.flickr.com/photos/me/stats/YYYY-MM-DD/refs/
www.flickr.com/photos/me/stats/YYYY-MM-DD/allphotos/