SmartFrame’s Insights feature helps you to keep on top of everything to do with your images, and using this information wisely can pay dividends. We explain how.

SmartFrame has evolved to the point where it’s clear that there’s no single correct way to use the platform. What works for you really depends on what it is you want to achieve. Maybe it’s greater security over your images, better presentation, or perhaps increased sales. Perhaps it’s a combination of these – or something completely different.

One thing that all users can benefit from, however, is the Insights component, something that’s available to all personal and business users as standard.

This compiles a comprehensive range of stats that tell you far more about both your images and your SmartFrames than you’d otherwise ever know – and there’s plenty that can be done with this information.

From informing the design and layout of your website to fine-tuning Campaigns and boosting your e-commerce potential, learning about your audience’s behavior is the logical way of helping you achieve your goals faster and smarter.

Here’s everything you need to know to help you get started with SmartFrame Insights.

How to get started with SmartFrame Insights

When you log in to your account, simply click on Insights on the top navigation panel. Once you do, you’ll be presented with an at-a-glance view of recent activity.

The first things you’ll see are your most popular images, which are ranked by most views, most clicks, and most shares, and hovering over these images with your mouse cursor gives you more detailed information on that specific image.

Further panels show interactions with your images and your latest SmartFrames, together with the number and proportion of shares on social media sites and elsewhere.

These figures are provided for the past 30 days as standard, although you can amend this to a shorter or longer time frame using the drop-down control in the upper-left-hand corner. You can also click on the See More button within any of these panels, which allows you to check a broader range of information.

Image and SmartFrames interactions: what they tell you and why it’s useful

SmartFrame allows you to add a raft of features to your images, and these serve a range of purposes.

Some of these help you to present your images in the best way possible, while others provide further information on an image’s contents. These can also be used to grow your online audience and channel traffic to where it matters the most.

Some of these features are designed to be interacted with, and these interactions are recorded in Insights. Interactive features that you can add to SmartFrames include:

● Full-screen viewing: Fills the screen with your SmartFrame

● Hyper Zoom: Allows viewers to zoom progressively further into the SmartFrame

● Information button: Allows you to add additional details to describe what’s in the image within the SmartFrame

● Share button: Presents a range of options for sharing a link to your SmartFrame

● Call-to-action button: Allows you to highlight a social media channel, newsletter, and more

Using this information to gauge which features and images are popular is all the more important when you consider that many photographers and content owners have their own favorite images in their collection, only to find that other images resonate better with their audience.

So how can you put this information to good use? At a basic level, knowledge of an image’s popularity can be very useful when it comes to selecting images for your homepage, social media profiles, business cards, and other marketing materials.

If you run any Campaigns on your images, you can choose to use a clearly popular image as part of a promotional banner on several SmartFrames, or, alternatively, target SmartFrames that contain popular images with separate promotional messages.

This is where you may want to experiment with additional features you may not have used before. Let’s say you have an image that has been particularly popular in some way – perhaps people would like to buy a print of this image? You can experiment with a Call-to-action button, with an icon and wording of your choice, such as in the example below.

Some images will always tend to attract more attention than others. Landscapes, for example, are always popular. Images with plenty of fine detail will likely attract the use of Hyper Zoom, while portraits, or other images containing people, are also more likely to attract attention.

Knowledge of how an image is being viewed and interacted with can also be used to inform what you publish in the future. If, for example, you’re selling prints or other products, you may find people using tools such as Hyper Zoom and Full-screen viewing to scrutinize details prior to a purchase being made. This not only underlines the importance of including these in future SmartFrames, but also of uploading images in a sufficiently high resolution to allow these features to work well, something that will only grow in importance as display technology improves and displays with higher-resolution panels become more common.

Tip: make sure to take into account all possible reasons as to why one image may be getting more attention than others. Perhaps it’s been used repeatedly, or shared more widely on social media than others. Or it may be that you’ve enabled certain features for one Theme and not another. Here, data on specific SmartFrames rather than images may be more useful to take into consideration.

Combating image-theft attempts

Anyone who cares about the appearance of their website will wonder to what extent they need to protect their images. Traditional methods of protecting images online, such as only posting low-resolution images and using permanently embedded watermarks, have generally resulted in a less-than-ideal appearance.

SmartFrame is far more flexible here, and its default settings provide strong protection over various forms of image theft, but many image owners still find it useful to know whether people are attempting to steal their images.

SmartFrame notices and records right-click and screenshot attempts on embedded SmartFrames. While right-clicks are not always theft attempts, a high number of right-click actions and screenshot attempts on a particular SmartFrame certainly suggests this may be the case. If you notice certain images attracting this kind of attention, you can reinforce the default protection with further deterrents:

Dynamic Watermark

This method of watermarking allows you to apply watermarks to existing SmartFrames and amend them at any point, without you having to re-upload your images. So, if you decide on a new watermark, or feel the need to make an existing watermark larger or smaller, or more or less opaque, you can do this directly through the Admin Panel. To access this, just head to the Theme you are currently using and scroll down to Watermark on the left-hand-side panel.

Out-of-focus protection

SmartFrame provides instant protection over common screenshot attempts using the default methods, such as Shift+Cmd+3 on a Mac, but screenshots can also be captured using third-party tools. For this reason, you can augment the default protection with an Out-of-focus protection option, which places a fine pattern over the image as soon as the user’s mouse cursor leaves the browser viewport. To access this, just head to the Theme you are currently using and scroll down to Advanced on the left-hand-side panel.

If you’re a Standard or Professional user, you can even customize the screenshot-deterrent message, perhaps to highlight legitimate sharing options, or even to draw attention to licensing or purchasing information for that specific image. You’ll find this option in the same Advanced panel as Out-of-focus protection.

Further ideas

If you notice your SmartFrames are performing well on a particular domain that’s not your own, you may want to explore a partnership with this channel, perhaps with a promotion that specifically targets this domain’s audience. To view this information, simply click on the box that shows the total number of domains on which your SmartFrames are found when you first enter the Insights panel, before clicking on Domains.

If you want to see trends and how well your SmartFrames have done over a longer period of time, you can view your data graphically. In the Insights panel, in the box titled Latest SmartFrames, click on See More before clicking on Graphs. Now just specify the time period you would like to check from the date drop-down menu and your results will be displayed below. This is also a good way to check spikes in views, clicks or shares that may have previously been missed.

Finally, it’s always a good idea to periodically check SmartFrames for missing images, particularly if you use an account to which a number of people have access. SmartFrames whose images are missing will remain embedded as SmartFrames, but they will indicate that the image itself is missing. Understanding where these are will allow you to remove inactive SmartFrames and replace these with new ones, which should help to keep your site looking professional and any other representation you have online as expected. In the Insights panel, in the box titled Latest SmartFrames, click on See More before checking the Missing Image option from the Status drop-down menu, making sure your date range is sufficiently broad to capture all missing images.

 

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