Searching for a Clue

I have recently begun keeping closer track of the traffic to my website. I am not using publicly available tools for this (why not - I really don't know). I keep my own logs and have developed some scripts that spit out some statistics for me. A few nuggets of information has some out of this.

Image-Based Searches

For one, and this was a little surprising to me, image-based searches usually resulted in very little follow-on traffic. Visitors coming to my site from, say, a Google or Yahoo image search typically only view that one photo that they linked to. They don't explore other parts of my site.

Now this is perfectly understandable. When you perform an image search, and click on a specific thumbnail that you find might meet your needs (whether it be to purchase a photo or, uh, "borrow" one for some other purpose) you are basically trying to confirm whether you like THAT PHOTO that you clicked on. You are really in the mindset of continuing your image search through the search engine, not exploring the target website.

At one point I was concerned with getting good rankings in the Google image search, but with this new information I'm not really that concerned any more.

Holiday Season

The other interesting piece of data is that during the winter holiday, i.e. the "gift-giving season", I seem to get a lot of subject-specific searches, and my sales during the holidays reflect that. When people buy photography as a gift I think the tendency is to buy a specific locational subject that the buyer believes the recipient knows and will appreciate. For example "Sea Isle Sunrise" or "Boathouse Row". I don't get a lot of "Fall Foliage" or "Waterfall" searches. Again - perfectly understandable.

Snow on Trees

One more interesting search that I get a lot of in November is for "Snow on Trees", or some variation of this. I have one particular image, shown below, that is a fairly good seller at shows, but not really that good online. But people search for this subject constantly. So what gives? My theory is that people are designing holiday cards or newsletters, either for their own personal use or for others, and they are looking for nice winter images to use for these. Although the quality and size of the image on my website is not appropriate for making prints, some people may find it acceptable for cards.

If this is true then I am sure people are stealing my images left and right, since I get no requests to license this image. It is nearly impossible for me to detect this (i.e. "enforce" my copyrights). And prevention measures are possible, such as making images much smaller on my site, going to a flash-based website, or slicing and dicing the image so it makes it harder to download manually. I am not inclined to do any of that for now, because I like the simplicity of my site - the way it operates, and the ease that I can maintain and update it.