BIG improvement in Smugmug stats: information on referrers! Thanks Smugmug!

Smugmug recently upgraded its statistics to add a new page with information about referrers.

This is very handy because it finally provides an easy way to locate photos from my site that have been embedded in blog posts, forum posts, or websites via links.  I mostly don't have a problem with that sort of use of my photos, as long as whoever did the embedding acknowledges that the photo wasn't theirs.  I do prefer that in addition to embedding the photo they also provide a link to the gallery from which it was drawn so that anyone who likes the photo has an opportunity to go to the gallery and see others from the same setting, and perhaps order some downloads or prints.  And so far, most people who have embedded photos of mine in blog posts, have also provided a link to the gallery, and thereby helped increase traffic to my site.

Until now I haven't had any way of finding out where my photos were embedded in forum posts, blogs, or other websites because Statcounter and Google Analytics only provide information on visitors to galleries.  They rely on Javascript to gather information about page views, and JPGs embedded elsewhere obviously don't trigger the Javascript that would lead to a page view being recorded.  In principle I might be able to get this information from Google Webmaster Tools, which is supposed to find links to a site, but right now the user interface for that service is too clumsy for me to figure out what I would have to do to get such information.  And I haven't had much luck searching for links to my site on the various search engines.

As soon as I saw Smugmug was now providing information on referrers, I checked it out, and sure enough, it provided some URLs where my photos had been embedded in forum posts, blogs, or other websites.  It was certainly gratifying to see that they appeared in the context of being introducing an area where they lived, or were familiar with, and used my photos to introduce the look of the area to viewers.

Basically all you have to do is go to the Referrers tab on the Statistics page and when are interested in finding the referring URL from a particular domain, click on 'Hits'.  Then you'll get a list of the pages at the site that link to your photos.

In this forum post, someone fondly recalling what Shanghai used to look like before all the construction of the last few years used some of my photos to introduce forum readers to the Shanghai he remembered...

http://www.ccthere.com/article/2912443

Unfortunately, he didn't link back to the gallery.  That would have been nice.  I guess I will write him.

In this blog, someone who had just moved to Nanluoguxiang from somewhere in the suburbs used a photo to give his readers some sense of what it looked like:

http://haonowshaokao.livejournal.com/3734.html

I was pleased to see that he also included a link to the gallery that included the photo.

Now this is where things get a little odd...  In a Spanish language site that I think is devoted to some kind of online role-playing game, someone embedded a photo of some mountains near the White Sands Missile Range in New Mexico in a post that I think was related to some kind of scenario for the game.  I hope it was, anyway:

http://www.comunidadumbria.com/?__Pg=1&PARTIDA=15280&ESCENA=3&MW=2&SW=201&MW=10&SW=0

And this post at SkyscraperCity in a forum thread devoted to pictures of the last stops of transport lines includes a picture from my site of the view from the platform at Waterfront Station in Vancouver, Canada...

http://www.skyscrapercity.com/showpost.php?p=9844942&postcount=10

Unfortunately, no link to the gallery.

Overall, the addition of the statistics on Referrers is for me the most important and useful addition to Smugmug statistics so far.  Almost everything else provided in Smugmug Statistics duplicates functionality offered by Statcounter or Google Analytics, but the Referrer statistics stand out for finally providing information about links to individual photos, as opposed to galleries.  Along those lines, I guess the other distinguishing feature of Smugmug Statistics are the counts of photo views, as opposed to page views, available under other tabs.

Way to go, Smugmug.  Keep it up!