analytics Archives - SmartFrame

SmartFrame Insights update: Getting to know the new and improved UI

SmartFrame — Wed, 15 Jun 2022 01:00:22 +0000

We’ve made some improvements to SmartFrame Insights that not only give you more data but also make it easier to access. Here’s a rundown of all the changes.

At SmartFrame, we understand the importance of accurate analytics and the ability to gather them quickly and efficiently. It’s for this reason that we’re excited to launch a number of updates to SmartFrame Insights, ensuring an even better experience for our users.

Updates include a new-look dashboard, streamlined reporting, additional filtering options, improved search functionality, and new metrics among other things.

Here, we take a closer look at some of the biggest changes, introducing what’s new and how it’s designed to help improve your workflow.

SmartFrame-focused data

The most fundamental change is the way in which we report figures. All reports now focus exclusively on SmartFrames, rather than splitting data between SmartFrames and images.

For clarity, the word ‘SmartFrame’ refers to every instance an image appears on a unique URL. The word ‘image’, on the other hand, refers to the source image file that has been uploaded, which can be streamed into multiple SmartFrames across many different URLs at the same time.

Focusing our data on SmartFrames helps to simplify the reporting process, providing a more streamlined overview of your SmartFrame analytics. It has also guided a number of other changes to the Insights tool – read on to learn more.

New-look dashboard

We have redesigned the dashboard to lead with impressions, presenting top-level information at a glance to provide you with the answers you need as quickly as possible.

With all reporting now focusing on SmartFrames alone, it’s been possible to condense essential data into one easy-to-navigate overview. This ease of reference has been further improved by the adoption of a color-coded system, which enables you to instantly recognize impressions (blue), engagement (green), and sharing (orange).

Streamlined reporting

Reports have been simplified into four categories: Overview, Engagements, Sharing, and Domains, with the top row of each report displaying a bold summary of overall totals. This more accessible design provides a quick and easy top-level perspective, with the ability to dive deeper if required.

Other things to note are the display of larger image thumbnails on mouseover, plus the ability to copy a SmartFrame’s URL with a single click.

We have also grouped all additional functions together under one handy menu represented by three dots in the far-left-hand column. These include the options to change Theme, block an embed, exclude an entire domain from displaying SmartFrames, and access a new dedicated SmartFrame details page.

The SmartFrame details page allows you to track impressions and engagements throughout the lifetime of each SmartFrame, filtering by date range and geographic location.

Enhanced filtering

By combining all filters into one dropdown menu, we have made it even easier to view, add, and edit filters as you wish, with the ability to select and clear with a single click.

‘Country’ has been added to the list to provide more detailed insights and locating individual SmartFrames is now even easier, with the ability to perform a quick search for a specific Image ID or URL.

Additional metrics

Finally, we have added a number of new metrics to provide an even more comprehensive insight into the performance of your SmartFrames.

The new metrics are listed below, each of which can be added or removed from reports using the column customization tool found in the Insights settings menu.

Programmatic theft attempts	Number of detected attempts to programmatically disable SmartFrame security
Impressions with programmatic theft attempts / right-clicks / screenshot attempts	Number of impressions that resulted in at least one of the above actions taking place
Embed button clicks (deterrent)	All clicks on the Embed button that is featured within the Deterrent panel
Pages	Available on the Domain report only, this is the number of pages that contain SmartFrames on the selected domain. For clarity, a page is defined as a unique URL

Need more help with the SmartFrame Panel? Visit our Help Center for a comprehensive guide to getting the very best out of the SmartFrame image-streaming platform

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Historic England launches Aerial Photo Explorer tool using SmartFrame’s technology

Peter Townshend — Fri, 25 Mar 2022 11:47:11 +0000

Historic England has launched its Aerial Photo Explorer tool, which uses SmartFrame’s image-streaming technology to showcase hundreds of thousands of previously unavailable aerial images

It is now possible to gain a truly unique view of how England’s landscape has evolved over the past 100 years thanks to Historic England’s brand-new Aerial Photo Explorer tool.

Accessible from the Historic England website, this new feature lets visitors use an interactive map to search, scroll, and zoom in to landmarks across the country. When a location is selected, it opens a SmartFrame containing one of over 400,000 available aerial images that span an entire century.

By making it possible to view evidence of medieval settlements, see famous industrial landmarks in their heyday, and marvel at modern-day architectural wonders, this tool provides a fascinating glimpse into England’s past and present, while documenting its continued transformation into the future.

The collection is being made available as part of the ongoing digitization of over six million aerial photographs preserved in the Historic England Archive. As such, it will be continually updated with new images from the collection.

Enhanced user experience

The Aerial Photo Explorer is a great example of how SmartFrames and their interactive features can be used by image owners and publishers to fantastic effect. The Hyper Zoom function enables viewers to zoom in to the finest details of each image, while full-screen viewing offers an even more immersive experience, all without affecting page loading times.

By enabling the Share function in the top right-hand corner of each image, Historic England has also made it possible for site visitors to legally share its images on social media and even embed them on their own websites for free.

The latter can be achieved by simply clicking the ‘Embed’ button, copying the code, and pasting it into the text editor on the back end of a website (be sure to read Historic England’s terms and conditions beforehand).

By doing this, you are streaming the image from its original source file rather than making a copy, much like embedding a YouTube video.

Another great benefit of image-streaming is the ability to embed SmartFrame Captions at source – a feature put to good use here by Historic England. These captions ensure every image features a permanently attached credit that will follow it wherever it is streamed. Many also specify the landmark and location the image depicts, further improving the user experience.

Behind-the-scenes benefits

The benefits for the user are clear for all to see, but there are also huge advantages behind the scenes for Historic England. By using SmartFrame’s image-streaming technology, the organization is able to better secure its images against theft while maintaining complete control over their distribution.

This is achieved through right-click and screenshot protection, which helps prevent bad actors from making copies of Historic England’s image files, whether intentional or otherwise. The same security protects its photographs from image-scraping bots that can steal countless files in seconds.

In addition to this enhanced security, SmartFrame provides Historic England with detailed image analytics, which deliver valuable insights into how users are interacting with its content.

It is possible to see the number of impressions each SmartFrame has enjoyed, along with the amount of engagement it has received.

With all this security and control, Historic England can ensure its extensive archive of images is not only protected, but always used in context and for agreeable means.

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Attention metrics: What they are and why you should use them

Peter Townshend — Tue, 15 Mar 2022 10:41:37 +0000

Attention metrics are fast becoming the future of analytics in digital marketing and advertising. Here’s everything you need to know.

In an online world that offers a seemingly infinite stream of digital content, users’ reluctance to pay to consume it is understandable. This has led to the popularity of attention economics, a concept economist Herbert A. Simon explored in 1971, which was later coined as the ‘attention economy’.

While the concept itself may not be new, the sheer volume of information that is available online means it is now more relevant than ever. Indeed, Simon himself summed it up perfectly by saying:

“In an information-rich world, the wealth of information means a dearth of something else: a scarcity of whatever it is that information consumes. What information consumes is rather obvious: it consumes the attention of its recipients. Hence a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention.”

It’s no wonder, then, that there is an increasing desire in the digital advertising and marketing industries to move away from traditional impression-based performance measurement in favor of attention metrics.

But what are attention metrics? Why should you use them? And what factors affect attention online? In this article, we explore everything you need to know.

The attention economy in a digital world

With such fierce competition for a user’s attention, digital publishers are investing huge sums of money into designing digital platforms that utilize every trick in the book to keep a user’s concentration firmly fixed on their content.

This could be anything from relatively simple techniques such as push notifications and auto-play video reels, to complex newsfeed algorithms and AI-powered recommendation engines.

So where does the money come from that’s driving all this investment? While some revenue does come from subscriptions, the overwhelming majority comes from advertising.

A modern example of this is YouTube, which offers YouTube Premium in addition to regular (free) YouTube. This provides users with the option of paying money for uninterrupted content or paying for content with their attention by watching compulsory advertisements, before and during a video.

With YouTube’s Q3 2021 ad revenue reportedly standing at $7.2bn, and its potential revenue from subscriptions standing at a much smaller $600m, it’s clear the value advertisers place on attention and indeed how lucrative it is for publishers. This has created a digital advertising industry projected to be worth nearly $495bn in 2024.

Having read this, it may surprise you to learn that the traditional digital advertising valuation model offers no way of measuring how much attention an ad received. Sure, the number of impressions tells an advertiser how many people could have seen their ad, but there is no way of knowing whether anyone actually took any notice.

The problem with impressions

In the context of digital advertising, there are good reasons why attention metrics are quickly gaining popularity over the current system.

Served impressions represent the number of times an ad is loaded on a webpage. Traditionally, advertisers would pay a price based on the number of served impressions their ad would achieve.

Initially, this presented a step up from the readership figures used in the days of print publishing. After all, it guaranteed that a user had actually seen the page on which an ad was placed, which meant the ad must have been in their line of sight, right?

Wrong. A served impression only guarantees an ad was loaded, not that it was ever in view.

The nature of scrolling webpages and the negligible cost of creating additional digital space meant bad actors could place endless digital ads at the bottom of a page that appeared so far down they would never come into view. This meant that while advertisers were paying good money for genuine impressions, their creatives would never actually see the light of day.

To combat this issue, the Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB), Association of National Advertisers (ANA), and the American Association of Advertising Agencies (4A’s) founded an initiative called Making Measurement Make Sense (3MS). This initiative led to the introduction of a Viewable Impressions system, in which an impression only counts if at least 50% of the ad’s pixels are in the viewable portion of a browser for at least one continuous second.

This was, of course, a move in the right direction, but it doesn’t reveal whether a user gave that content the time of day. Attention metrics go a step further towards achieving that goal.

What are attention metrics?

Attention metrics describe ways in which attention can be measured.

There is no single measurement of attention as it depends on what is being consumed and how (more on this below). But, invariably, they revolve around time – that is, how long someone has spent doing something, and more specifically, the exact actions they performed during that time.

In the digital world, when compared to impressions alone, attention metrics can give advertisers and publishers a much more accurate idea of how users are interacting with their content.

How do you measure attention?

There are countless ways to measure attention online. These vary according to exactly what your definition of attention is, which is likely to be influenced by the device on which content is being consumed, the design of the platform, the format of the content, and the nature of the business among other things.

While these detailed metrics can vary enormously between individual cases and analytics software, below are some general examples of how to measure attention.

Active time in view

On the most basic level, active time in view could describe the amount of time a piece of content or an advertisement is viewable in a foreground browser tab.

To gain a more accurate attention measurement, activity can also be considered. Cursor position, touch rate, scroll rate, and scroll depth can all be recorded to determine whether the user is interacting with the page when the content is in view (and, indeed, if they are interacting with the content itself).

For example, by using image-streaming technology that features interactive elements such as Hyper Zoom and full-screen viewing, it is possible to gain useful insights into the way users are interacting with images and where their attention is focused.

In the case of video content, rather than simply recording the number of plays, considering the number of plays to completion or the number of plays with audio can give a better idea of overall content performance.

The above attention metrics can be recorded in real time, in the real world, with real users, which has its benefits from a logistical and monetary standpoint. However, they could never provide a 100% accurate measure of attention. For that, lab-based methods are required.

Lab-based research

Eye tracking

One of the most accurate ways to measure attention is through eye tracking. This is where technology is used to record the movements of a user’s eyes, revealing exactly where they are looking on the screen.

This offers an unrivaled insight into user attention, such as how a user interacts with a piece of content, whether or not they notice on-page ads, and how easily they navigate a user interface.

Facial coding

Facial coding is the process of using computer software to automatically recognize facial expressions via a webcam. This technology can provide valuable insights into how a user is feeling when they are viewing a piece of content.

Why use attention metrics?

The world of digital advertising is an extremely nuanced environment; what works in one place might be disastrous in another.

By using attention metrics to measure performance and inform advertising, content, and user experience (UX) strategies, it is possible for advertisers and publishers to walk that fine line between hard sales and user experience.

In each of the cases below, attention metrics can and have been used to provide a level of insight that allows publishers to optimize their UX and advertisers to enjoy higher-quality placement, ultimately giving the user a better online experience.

Creative

Dentsu’s Attention Economy Program Phase 2 Research found quality of ad creative to have the largest effect on user attention, impacting recall by up to 17%.

However, it is not just advertisers who can benefit from this insight. The same metrics can be used to guide branding and web design by revealing how design affects a user’s engagement with a publisher’s content.

Page clutter

While it’s easy to assume that a higher number of different images, CTAs, or advertisements will present the user with greater choice and lead to a better user experience, the opposite can often be true.

For instance, Miller’s Law states that the average person can only keep between five and nine items in their working memory, and with analysis paralysis an ever-growing part of our digital lives, maybe less is more?

Ad size and format

The size of an ad, and whether it makes use of a still or moving image, can have a significant effect on the extent of attention it attracts, and also the reasons for that attention.

For example, a huge pop-up advertisement may well be noticed, but is it being noticed for the right reasons? Learning how users interact with that content can provide a better idea of its overall performance.

On-page ad positioning

It is widely acknowledged that an ad’s position on a page makes a big difference to the amount of attention it gets. But what position is best?

Prominent leaderboard ads may be front and center when a user arrives on a page, but that doesn’t necessarily mean they get the most attention. Indeed, banner blindness could mean they are completely overlooked.

Research from Chartbeat shows that 65.7% of engagement takes place below the fold, which means that ads positioned further down a page, and even at the end of an article, are likely to gain more attention than those displayed elsewhere.

Page content

The use of served impressions to measure ad value created an online world where the priority for many publishers was simply page visits. As long as the ad was served, they got their money, and little regard was ever paid to the user. This gave rise to clickbait headlines linking to pages characterized by low-quality content and high bounce rates.

Research suggests that users who spend 15 seconds or longer viewing a piece of content are 25% more likely to recall a brand than those who view it for 10 seconds, which makes clear the negative effect such practices can have on ad performance.

While this has undoubtedly been bad for users and advertisers, the publishers are now also paying the price. The lack of quality content online has eroded trust and devalued inventory, and with the third-party cookie soon to disappear, a huge focus is being placed on contextual advertising.

All things considered, ensuring ads appear in context among engaging content has never been more important.

Forced advertising vs voluntary advertising

Finally, whether an ad is forced or chosen can make a large difference to its success. Research shows that forced advertising needs double the amount of time to deliver the same impact as voluntary ads. Therefore, paying a premium for a 10-second compulsory pre-roll video ad might not be the most cost-effective strategy.

The future of attention metrics

With mounting evidence that the current digital advertising performance measurement model is broken, combined with the fundamental changes being brought by the death of the third-party cookie, attention metrics are set to play an increasingly important role in the new era of digital advertising.

For example, Dentsu’s previously mentioned Attention Economy Program Phase 2 Research found that when a client optimized their advertising for attention, it garnered 3.7 years of greater attention in one month than it did when optimized for reach and frequency at the same budget.

For this reason, the sooner and more extensively advertisers and publishers implement these analytics and begin using attention metrics to inform strategies and price points, the more they stand to gain.

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Decision intelligence: How AI is using big data to guide big business

Peter Townshend — Mon, 21 Feb 2022 18:14:07 +0000

Decision intelligence is currently attracting plenty of investment around the world. But why? Read on to discover more about this burgeoning AI-powered strategic tool.

In our hyper-connected digital world, it’s hard to get through a single day without hearing the word ‘data’ at some point. Whether it’s being bought, sold, stolen, or protected, one thing’s for sure – everyone wants it. And why wouldn’t they? More data means more knowledge and more knowledge means more power.

By 2025, it is projected that there will be a staggering 181 zettabytes of data created, captured, copied, and consumed around the world. And it’s only when you consider that one zettabyte is equal to a trillion gigabytes that you start to appreciate the seemingly endless number of decisions this amount of data could inform.

Increasing access to these ever-growing oceans of information has prompted many organizations to change the way they do business and adopt a digital data-led strategy – and this has given rise to the most modern form of business intelligence (BI).

What is business intelligence?

Modern business intelligence (BI) describes the process of using technology to collect, analyze, and display digital data in a digestible format, before using these analytics to make better-informed business decisions.

The BI process is widespread throughout the business world. In the 2020 Global State of Enterprise Analytics report from analytics software provider MicroStrategy, for example, 94% of respondents said data analytics is important to their business growth.

The same report showed just how useful BI is proving to be for the organizations that are able to use it. 64% of respondents said that the use of analytics had improved efficiency and productivity, with 56% saying that it had led to faster and more effective decision making.

What’s the problem with business intelligence?

While it’s one thing to gather and view this data, understanding and manipulating it, then presenting it in a way that a layperson can understand, is another.

This gap in technical know-how, combined with a lack of data culture within businesses, creates significant issues around accessibility. The aforementioned report also showed that while 80% of managers have access to data and analytics, only 52% of front-line workers can say the same.

Furthermore, a survey conducted by New Vantage Partners (NVP) in 2021 found that 92.2% of respondents identified people, business processes, and culture as the principal challenges to becoming data-driven.

Without company-wide visibility and accessibility, data can become siloed within departments, which can limit a business’s overall view and hinder its agility when reacting to changes in the industry.

So how can businesses harness the true power of big data quickly and effectively enough to respond to trends as they happen – and even predict future market behavior – without the need for a data scientist? The answer is artificial intelligence in decision making, otherwise known as decision intelligence.

What is decision intelligence?

Decision intelligence describes the concept of applying artificial intelligence (AI) to available data for the purpose of making predictions, recommendations, and decisions.

While business intelligence concerns the use of technology to gather, process, and present data, which is then used to inform a decision made by a human, decision intelligence goes one step further by also using technology to provide recommendations and predictions, and even make the decisions themselves.

How does decision intelligence work?

In a business context, the decision intelligence process works by feeding all available data into a central AI-powered application. The more extensive and diverse this data is, the more accurate and reliable the outcome will be. So, for example, information should not only come from all departments, but it should include both transactional and behavioral data, and, where possible, be sourced internally and externally.

The decision intelligence application uses this collected data to consider possible scenarios and, in turn, construct actions and alternatives in the context of the business’s overall capabilities.

Suggested actions are then presented for decision makers to act on as they wish. This process avoids the compartmentalization of data within different areas of a business and ensures that even the smallest decisions are made in a company-wide and even industry-wide context.

Furthermore, the decision intelligence application then tracks the outcome of decisions that have been made, learning from consequences and using that knowledge to inform future modeling.

Why use decision intelligence?

As the digital world becomes increasingly interconnected, it grows in unpredictability and complication. This more complex business landscape creates tougher business decisions, so automating part of the decision-making process helps in two main ways.

Efficiency

The volume of data that companies can gather has become so great that using it to make well-informed decisions by traditional methods is inefficient.

By the time the information has been presented and considered by decision makers with busy schedules, hours, days, or weeks could have passed. This is far too long in today’s agile business environment, where staying ahead of the competition often means making key decisions in minutes or even seconds.

Decision intelligence can provide recommendations in an instant, even from the most comprehensive big-data sets. This combination of speed, accuracy, and scalability allows companies to be agile enough to react to market trends in real time.

Democratization of analytics

The complexity of data analytics can make it somewhat inaccessible to less tech-savvy people, but many key decisions are made by hands-on managers who are rarely exposed to such intricate technical information.

For example, the Global State of Enterprise Analytics report found that 79% of employees that aren’t adept at analytics have to ask their IT department or a business analyst for help when making a data-led decision. Furthermore, 61% of less-data-skilled employees wait a few hours, a few days, or longer to get the data they need.

This data skills gap is a common issue among businesses and has been recognized by the UK Government in a 2021 policy paper, which estimates that the problem led to the UK data economy realizing only around half of its full potential in 2016.

Decision intelligence changes this. By using AI to crunch the numbers and formulate recommendations, unskilled workers no longer need to be exposed to such confusing data. With all predictions and guidance presented to them in an easily understood format, they can bypass time-consuming consultations with analysts and act immediately.

What can decision intelligence be used for?

As long there is enough data to work from, decision intelligence can make recommendations on any decision, from the color of a worker’s uniform to a multi-billion-dollar buyout. Here are a few examples of how it can help businesses.

Decision intelligence in user experience (UX)

With an increasing number of businesses operating solely online, the importance of user experience (UX) has never been greater. Once a user arrives on a website, the owner of that website wants to keep them there. However, with many big e-commerce websites or content providers serving millions of users every day, it’s impossible to manage them all personally.

That’s where decision intelligence can help. By gathering first-party data from these users as they navigate a website, AI-powered recommendation engines can make UX decisions based on activity. This could be which article to read next, which songs appear on a playlist, product suggestions or something else.

Decision intelligence in sales

By processing historical sales data, decision intelligence can be useful in sales optimization. Deal timelines, conversion rates, and even likely sales revenue can be predicted based on past results.

Data on consumer behavior can also be assessed to help decide the most effective sales techniques for individual prospects, as well as identifying the most promising sales leads and performing risk assessments among other things.

Decision intelligence in HR

In the most basic instance, decision intelligence in HR can be used to streamline the recruiting process, using AI to assess resumes submitted for a specific role.

It can, however, go further than simply matching job descriptions to skill sets. Other examples include assessing a candidate’s suitability to company culture; measuring workforce performance to decide on training requirements and project allocation; and even evaluating different recruitment methods for efficiency and value for money.

Decision intelligence in supply chain and logistics

It’s never been more important for businesses to ensure supply chains are fully optimized. Decision intelligence can use market data to forecast demand and make complex decisions in capacity planning, helping to ensure maximum productivity.

It can also be used to improve all aspects of delivery. Examples could be streamlining warehouse operations for smooth dispatch processes, or planning and optimizing delivery routes, redirecting drivers in real time to avoid delays.

Decision intelligence companies

Decision intelligence tools are available from a growing number of providers, including IBM, Quantellia, Busigence, and Oracle Business Intelligence, all of which offer AI decision-making software.

The power of the technology is also by no means lost on Google. In 2019, the tech giant appointed Cassie Kozyrkov as its Chief Decision Scientist, who in her own words is on a mission to “democratize decision intelligence and safe, reliable AI.”

Additionally, the previously mentioned startup Peak boasts a diverse client list that includes the likes of AO World and GlaxoSmithKline.

The problem with decision intelligence

Decision intelligence is only as good as the data it can utilize. This means it is likely to widen the gap between the already dominant big-tech players with eye-watering amounts of information at their disposal, and the smaller organizations that do not have access to such diverse data sets.

Additionally, the potential for artificial intelligence to completely replace executive decision making in the future is strong. This is likely to be cost-effective for businesses, although it would have an unavoidable negative impact on global employment.

Finally, in a world where AI is actively making key operational decisions about how a business is run, there could be something else to consider. Humans base decisions on facts and experience as far as possible, but cognitive bias and emotion are typically factors too. While many decision intelligence models do incorporate social science, this finely nuanced emotional decision making is something machines are lacking.

Indeed, the best decisions are often made with a cool, rational head – but many successful business leaders might argue that their ability to act on gut instinct is what has given them the edge.

The future of decision intelligence

The NVP survey mentioned above found that 99% of respondents invested in big data and AI in 2021, with 62% spending $50m and above. Furthermore, in its Top Strategic Technology Trends for 2022 report, Gartner predicts that by 2023 more than a third of large organizations will have analysts practicing decision intelligence.

With decision intelligence set to become so much more commonplace, there’s no doubt data is more valuable than ever. With such importance placed on comprehensive data sets, it’s time for businesses to look for innovative ways to gather information on consumer behaviors.

New technologies such as image streaming can provide valuable analytics for businesses who want to learn more about the way people interact with their content. By acting now to establish new data streams, businesses can ensure they are well-placed to harness the power of decision intelligence as the technology becomes more widely accessible.

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Image streaming: How it works, why you need it and everything else you need to know

Peter Townshend — Fri, 26 Nov 2021 10:50:01 +0000

Image streaming is set to revolutionize the way we view and publish images online. But how does it work? And what are the benefits? We explain all.

Any new or unfamiliar technology can seem intimidating at first – and image streaming is no exception.
Indeed, just the idea of streaming images might itself seem odd. Why exactly would you want to stream an image? What’s wrong with just uploading a JPEG?

The reality is that image streaming is easy to understand and even easier to use – and the benefits for image owners, publishers, and advertisers are huge.

In this article, we explain everything you need to know about image streaming, and show you how you can make it work for you.

What is image streaming?

Image streaming is a secure and efficient way to publish and display images online.

Instead of uploading individual image files such as JPEGs, PNGs or GIFs directly to a website, images are embedded using a piece of code, much like you would embed a YouTube video.

Can anyone stream images?

Yes, anyone can stream images. All you need to do is set up an account and you’re ready to begin streaming your images securely online.

How does image streaming work?

The first step is to upload your images to a secure, password-protected central server.

Once uploaded, you can generate an embed code that links to a specific image, which can then be pasted into a compatible webpage editor such as WordPress or Weebly.

Embedded images will be displayed publicly much like when uploaded via traditional methods, but with numerous additional features (outlined below).

You can also allow images to be shared by activating embed and social sharing buttons, which appear within the image frame. This enables anyone viewing the image to copy the code and embed it as they wish.

Why is streaming images better than posting JPEGs, GIFs or PNGs?

It’s more secure

The current method of publishing images online leaves them completely unprotected against theft. A simple screenshot, right-click or drag-and-drop action is all it takes for a bad actor to create a copy of your image and redistribute it without your consent (or knowledge).

Worse still, image-scraping bots can crawl your entire website unchecked, downloading every image as they go.

By streaming images, you protect them against the above threats. And as they are all streamed from one place, no matter how many times an image is embedded or viewed, it’s always streamed from a single file for maximum security.

It looks better

Usually, images on websites are static and restricted to low resolutions to ensure the fastest possible loading times.

Image-streaming technology changes this, turning ordinary JPEGs into highly engaging images designed to have maximum impact.

Through features such as full-screen viewing and the ability to zoom in to the finest details, your images become fully interactive. Further integrated options, such as embed buttons and sharing controls, encourage users to share them securely.

Furthermore, because images are streamed rather than permanently uploaded to a site, only the detail that’s required on demand is served. This keeps image delivery efficient and your site light, while still ensuring that users see all the detail they require as they jump to full-screen views and zoom in and out.

It provides you with complete control

The fact that every image is streamed from one location gives you more than just security – it also gives you unprecedented control.

Once uploaded, it’s possible to attach uneditable metadata, captions and attribution to your images, and these stay with the images wherever they’re embedded.

Additionally, it’s possible to view a list of every URL and domain that is displaying your images and block them at your discretion so that they only appear where you want them to.

It also gives you comprehensive analytics

The ability to track where your images are viewed and shared is one of the prime advantages of image streaming over conventional uploading. But an additional benefit of this is that you also gain valuable data on usage.

Detailed image analytics provide you with the opportunity to measure image performance by the number of views, clicks, shares and other engagements. You can also see where these shares take place, view theft attempts and much more.

Can I make money from image streaming?

Absolutely. It’s possible to serve digital advertising into image-streaming windows, which means the more impressions images receive, the more money they stand to make.

In-image advertising works on a contextual basis. It uses a broad set of metadata and artificial intelligence (AI) to read both the contents of an image and the contents of the page on which it’s displayed. Not only does this mean that advertising is always relevant, but it also ensures brand safety for advertisers.
A proportion of the ad revenue generated goes to both the content owner and the content publisher, putting well-deserved dollars back into the hands of those hardest hit by the unsecure nature of the current online image ecosystem.

What are the benefits of image streaming for content owners?

Content owners can be anyone from independent photographers and visual artists through to global news agencies. Wherever you fall on that spectrum, you’ll enjoy the same benefits of image streaming.

Image streaming gives you the peace of mind of knowing that your content is displayed in a high enough resolution to look good across various devices, but protected against theft. It’s also fully tracked and easier to control where your images travel online.

This means you can be completely sure your images are being used as intended, always appearing with your chosen caption and/or credit.

In-image advertising also opens up a new revenue stream for content owners. This new way to monetize images is welcome in a digital imaging landscape where it’s getting harder and harder to make money.

These combined factors give artists, photographers, and other content owners the freedom to distribute their images to a wider audience without the fear of theft or value leakage.

What are the benefits of image streaming for publishers?

Publishers that stream images include anyone who embeds an image on their domain. This could range from an individual blogger to an image library.

Because image streaming allows content owners to monetize their images through advertising, many are happy to make their images available to you for free.

This gives you access to a huge pool of high-quality, free content that would otherwise be subject to usage fees under the traditional restrictive licensing model.

Image streaming also offers your audience a better user experience than with conventional images, with built-in interactive features such as Hyper Zoom, full-screen viewing, and captioning encouraging higher engagement.
However, possibly the best part is that if the images you publish receive enough impressions from your domain, you’ll get a share of the advertising revenue. This means you can earn money simply from embedding an image on your site.

Additionally, image metadata and various AI technologies ensure all ad placements are relevant and contextual, and leading ad-security providers prevent threats from bad ads. This means you can enjoy complete brand protection.

What are the benefits of image streaming for advertisers?

Advertisers keen on taking advantage of image streaming can enjoy a long list of benefits. If you’re looking for high-visibility placement on webpages relevant to your ads, in-image advertising is for you.

Images are often the focal point of any online article or page, so by serving ads over them, you gain premium ad placement.
The ads appear briefly and only occasionally in selected SmartFrames. These are also contextually targeted, which means they work with a webpage’s content and the image on which they are displayed so that they are as relevant as possible.

This also means they don’t require the use of intrusive third-party cookies; considering the current changes in data collection and the effect these will have on personalized ads, this provides a far more logical foundation for a future-proofed ad strategy.
Furthermore, with image streaming, you’re protected from the potential damage caused by badly placed ads. That’s because in-image advertising makes use of AI to check images and webpage content so that your ads are always shown in brand-safe environments.

How do I start streaming images?

Content owners

If you’re a content owner, it’s easy to start streaming your images. Simply go to the SmartFrame registration page, enter your details and follow the instructions.

If you encounter any issues, our extensive Help Center is on hand to provide you with everything you need to know.

Publishers

If you’re a website owner or publisher who wants to stream other people’s images, all you need is an embed code. You can get this by simply clicking on the embed icon – which looks like – within the image window, before copying the code and adding it to your web editor’s HTML or text editor. Take a look at our Embedding guide for more information.

The content owner has to activate the embed option on their streamed images, so if the embed icon isn’t there, the image is not available for free embedding.

In exchange for a free embedded image, the content owner will usually require that contextual ads are served over the images you publish. In order to ensure this happens, you’ll need to add the SmartFrame Publisher ID to your domain’s ads.txt page.

If you don’t have an ads.txt page, you’ll need to create one – here’s how it’s done. This gives our ad partners permission to sell inventory on your behalf. Want to learn more? Here’s everything you need to know about ads.txt.

The post Image streaming: How it works, why you need it and everything else you need to know appeared first on SmartFrame.

SmartFrame Insights: How to use your data to make better decisions

Matt Golowczynski — Wed, 09 Sep 2020 16:15:39 +0000

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.

What if I have the same image embedded in many different places online?

SmartFrame allows you to view interactions in two ways: by image and by SmartFrame. The same image, after all, can be transformed into many SmartFrames, so having this choice allows to you view only the most relevant information.

Let’s say you upload an image to SmartFrame and embed it on your website, your blog and perhaps your online store too. Data for this particular image would collate all views, shares, and other interactions to give you the fullest picture of its performance. Viewing these per SmartFrame, however, gives you a clearer idea of the performance of a specific SmartFrame, which means you can also compare results between different SmartFrames.

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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