Q: How Many Visitors Does It Take To Make A Sale?

I've been on FAA for just over a year now.

Sold 1 piece, until 1 month ago, when we sold 4 in the last month, 3 of the same piece!



Views dont directly have to do with sales obviously, but this piece is the most viewed and available around the net, but I would love to have more solid stats on views and where they are from, and in particular, sales stats.

Where did my buyer(s) click through from, FAA search, Google search, website links I've promoted myself on FB, Twitter, Web sites?

Through out the year, I've been posting blogs, FB TW,Tumblr, Pinterest etc, and although it got some kind of views, never really any sales.

And, then to get 4 in 1 month, must be to do with a certain link somewhere. But, with the current stats, its impossible for me to know unfortunately. Even the little 'view' stats on each image on FAA arnt always correct, disregarding the bot flooding, some of my buyers dont even register as a view, which is strange.

A start would be to get Google Analytics on ALL pages and ALL sites, not just AW. And also some kind of info on your sales, like where they came from (ie HTTP_REFERER)

Some say, you dont need to know that, well I do... I want to concentrate more work on the area that gets me more sales (and to some extent views)

As for now... I just hope that whatever the link was, keeps bringing in more :) and blindly go on promoting externally.

Rob.

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Fantasy Art Web Site

I have 56k views and 0 print sales:)) Took me 45k to sold a pack of 10 cards. It really doesn´t matter how much views from bots do you have.

I'm at around 3600 views and I've yet to get a sale on FAA. I'm not complaining though because I just started here in August. I get the lion share of my views from Twitter and I don't think those are the most solid views (so far I'm going to guess it's 90% other artists). Take those away and I'd probably be lucky to have 500 views. But more and more I'm seeing views that are likely from searches - views from cities in my state for example.

But no, not all views are equal. People finding you through search are MUCH better than people finding you through social media. I bet they have a much better chance of actually buying.

the views don't matter as much as the appeal. that girl is something to look at, not put on the living room wall. the views are kind of irrelevant. i had something sold that only have a 164 view, but it took 4 years before it sold. some things are just lookers with lots of views.

---Mike Savad

Good morning Edward. I'll take those fries now please.

Hmmm... views . I think when I did the math I was averaging about 385-400 views pr sale. I had a lot less inventory then, & that was Pre- Pinterest days - so I am sure those stats changed.
My most viewed and favored images are the same ones that have repeat sales. I could probably just have 10 of my watercolors here, & that would complete my sales.
But I know it doesn't work like that. " The sum of the whole is greater than the sum of the parts ... " ?

Less keywords = less views, but hopefully more valuable ones. I am now preferring to keep my keywords more limited. In truth, just because I will put off uploading if I know I have to do all that thinking at once.

I try to keyword as if I was looking for an image - what would I type in. Sometimes what it is to you is so obvious, that you forget to think about how one would try to track it down it they had once saw it on the 'Net.

Beautiful and creative body of work you have. Winter chapel may be my favorite.

The buyers register as views but may be from a month ago. From when they put it in their cart.

On-site conversion comes from perceived value. In other words, if this video is boring to you then it's possible you're seeing more views ( shoppers ) than buyers.

How many bots = 1 visitor

Just as I was about to say how one of my images has 6,500 views and no sales, I sold it :) Ha!
But I am averaging around 6,000 views per sale, proves how many bots and artists are out there.

any time you say - post my whatever, or comment on my image or any time your in a "club" where you favorite each other - it counts as a view. not all are bots.


---Mike Savad

So Parker, your conversion rate is 6,500 to 1. That's a lot of image threads. Something to work on --- finding more potential buyers.

Best I've done from upload to print sale was 24 hours. That was a shocker. Typically I find stuff has to percolate for months or years before it sees any action. Finding the right buyer for an image takes time.

dreaded double post

I should clarify. We are talking about views of a individual image. Unless you think buyers are looking for you - the artist - rather than a single image. I could have hundreds of showgirl photos in my portfolio and generate a tremendous number of overall views - but what does that mean for sales? Nada.

Unless you are a household name the chances that you will be google by name is low compared to the subject matter of your images.

Bingo!

Views do not drive sales, sales drive the views.

Big advertises, the billion dollar corporations with million and millions to spend on advertising, talk in term of impressions. One person sees the ad or the product equals one impression, or in our case view.

Talk about views on FAA you have to first understand that a bot visit is NOT a view. So where does that leave us?

Pretty much in the dark unless you are going to go try to figure out the real views form the bots. Even after you do that you don't have anything meaningful.

The raw number of views (or impressions) in itself is meaningless.

Back to the big advertisers and what they are looking for: Quality.

The quality of the impression or view is much more important then the raw number of impressions.

Take beer commercials, something anyone that watches sports can relate to.

I had a close relationship with the west coast Budweiser division years ago though a professional cycling event I was involved in.

Their number one concern was reaching their demographic. They only wanted to reach 21 to 55 year old people, preferable males. That is what they considered a quality impression. Everything else was worthless to them.

Once they had the demographic established and how to reach them and see respectable returns, they now worry about creating views directly related to the sales. Now they look at how many views or impressions it took to get how much money in sales.

If my cycling event meet the demographic standards that should return good but not great returns then they signed on. But they paid a lot less per impression then they did for adverting in an NFL football game where they would get much better returns per impression. This is where you get into the real meat of it all. Cycling events were threshold events for Budweiser in those days. It was the right demographic age wise but not the best considering lifestyle vs NFL fans.

You can carry that one step further also. We never planed our event during football season. The ad budget was all directed to football for the most part.

So, once it is established how to create a quality view or impression, you now step up your efforts to create more of them. You find out what works and do more of it.

That is how sales drive views, not the other way around.

Views are important, and if you have been able to establish the right campaign to create the right results, you then start concentrating on creating as many views as possible. But until you have established the quality of you views, they are meaningless.

Mike has mentioned before that things need to simmer about 6 months before you ( typically ) see a sale on it.
I have found that to be very true. Like clockwork, almost to the day - a series of sales.
Must just be a Google thing.

A. It takes the same amount of people that can smell the color 7*

*That answer has been determined after over 5 years of exhaustive research of faa and its statistics.

I have sold images within a few days of uploading them.

A new image will sit with no sales directly related to how aggressive you are adverting and promoting your work or that specific image.

The more you depend on the mercy of the search engines, any search engines, the more you are leaving it to the law of averages and/or pure chance. That being the case it could sell the fist day or never.

@Marlene I love that!

A. It takes the same amount of people that can smell the color 7*

"That answer has been determined after over 5 years of exhaustive research of faa and its statistics."

If you are talking about the stats that FAA supplies us in the way of views, I find them totally meaningless. There is no way of determine the quality of those not bot views.

I have no idea how many views I have, I rarely even look at them.

wink wink, Floyd

Other sites I use are able to tell you which views came in from their search engine (and which terms were used) which I'm guessing FAA could do pretty easily if they wanted to. I'm guessing that would add a lot of stress to their database to log search terms - I'm sure they get hundreds of thousands (at least) a day.

I agree with most of you guys that views don't matter that much. It only takes the right visitor to make a sale.

Cheers.

Congratulations! It only takes one person to buy and so many to just look. ;-)

It's the "hangability" factor that matters in terms of sales. People look at pretty showgirls…how many buy a print of one to hang on their wall? Probably not many.

311,120, Floyd.

lol!

Thanks Joseph!

I think the better question is how many buyers does it take to make a sale ... buyer being one who takes action more than just looking:

TODAY'S REALITY: Do everything you can to use business social media to build brand, image, reputation, and perceived value with your customers and your business community.
YOUR CHALLENGE: Send messages that your customers perceive as valuable to them. Messages so valuable that they will tell others.
BUSINESS SOCIAL MEDIA REALITY: It's not about tweeting; it's about being re-tweeted. It's not about finding someone on LinkedIn; it's about them finding you, and wanting to connect. It's not about searching out someone on Facebook; it's about someone finding your business Facebook Page and "liking" it. It's not about posting a video on YouTube; it's about someone sending your video to someone else.

People Know About You Before You Know About Them. As Floyd said it's about sales bringing views ... How are you Branding yourself??

FireFlux Studios, I agree. I have been begging for that data since the day I got here.

I was hoping that it was going to be in one of the paste or upcoming updates... so far, not so good.

I was some what disappointing when I learned that FAA may have it in their privacy statement that their personal information would not be shared with anyone. That is bummer. I would hope that like eBay, Amazon and the the other big houses they will revise that and include the artist.

However, because eBay and Amazon do not do the fulfillment and the supplier does, I doubt now that we are ever going to get that information.

I don't like it, but I can understand it and I can see why FAA is different. From the buyers point of view they probably do not want the artist to have their personal information seeing there is no reason for us to have it other then for our own purposes.

The data as to where the visitors are coming from and the other non-personal information would still be nice to have and I am still holding out hope that ti will happen.

"BUSINESS SOCIAL MEDIA REALITY: It's not about tweeting; it's about being re-tweeted. It's not about finding someone on LinkedIn; it's about them finding you, and wanting to connect. It's not about searching out someone on Facebook; it's about someone finding your business Facebook Page and "liking" it. It's not about posting a video on YouTube; it's about someone sending your video to someone else. "

This warrants being retweeted!

I mean repeated!!!

I can see how personal data could be abused. Artists might bombard the customer with daily emails or something.

What would be nice is if FAA sent said customer a monthly updated on new work or perhaps a promotional offer from their "favorite artist" and refrained from promoting other artists to this customer.

Now that would be cool, Ed.

I wonder what FAA has going on that keeps them in touch with past buyers? Some sort of news letter or something?

Then again maybe I don't want to go there. If I found out that they were sending out a news letter or promotion email to all the buyers including the ones that bought my images, but the contact piece was loaded with only the best sellers, I would be disappointed.

Oh shoot....

I think that is exactly what is going on!

I just remembered I do get promotional pieces from FAA and they never have my images on them.

At first I though it was strange that they would be sending out promo pieces to the members. But I have bought four or five pieces of my own work just to check the quality. So I am a customer as well as a member.

Maybe that is why I am getting those promo pieces.

Oh dang, now I am depressed.... lol

But I'll get over it! :-)

"What would be nice is if FAA sent said customer a monthly updated on new work or perhaps a promotional offer from their "favorite artist" and refrained from promoting other artists to this customer."

That is what the email campaign is for ... but you're right, Edward, those buyers have to make it in our email list. Too, I've thought for a long time how we need a tab on our gallery page for buyer testimonials. Nothing like a third party endorsement to be your salesperson. The FAA website has them so shouldn't it be a simple programing task to sort them to our gallery page?

I'm sorry I left you hanging with my last post, I was looking for this article to link. For Branding yourselves I strongly recommend the about.me platform to create your own SEO instead of depending on the search engines to do it.
Here is their blog article about "online reputation management":

http://blog.about.me/2014/09/23/online-reputation-managment/

Very true Frank. We get little feedback. I was in a conversation with a buyer who purchased a giant print and I gave her a discount on it. Asked if she would send my a photo once it was hung. Never heard back.

At least my book - The Quotable Westie get reviews. http://www.amazon.com/Quotable-Westie-Photographs-Edward-Fielding/dp/1481084372

Yeah, I wouldn't expect 'personal' information.

I just want to know how the buyer got to my image(s). (ie basically the HTTP_REFERER field from the Apache logs, but giving us Google Analytics would do that)

We can but request and hope :)

Per my last post, if you're interested in about.me here is my referral link for you:


Check out my @aboutdotme page - http://about.me/FrankJCasella. Get yours now before all the names are gone.

https://about.me/invite/code/770cbc1ed81b4a0d83e932248aa47238

Marlene: It smells like blue ;)

Louise :)

Obviously for me, a zillion. I only get a sale once in a great while from a friend. I have been unable to get the general public to buy anything. Just endless bots digging and digging.

It took over 1,000 plus views before I finally sold this piece. Other photos had only 50 views and I sold them a couple of times. I gave up trying to figure it all out.

a href='http://fineartamerica.com/featured/polaroid-perceptions-jane-linders.html' size='20'>

"I gave up trying to figure it all out. "

Until they stop including the bots and they start giving us the relevant data that can be used for something to improve the quality of the views; that is a smart move.

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