Vana - don’t judge your views against the Average. I think the average views for a day is getting skewed by the people who are re-posting an older piece. In other words, if the piece showed 6 months ago & had 50 views, and then is reposted tomorrow, it’ll carry those 50 views into the average for tomorrow. David can correct me if I’m wrong, but I’ve done quite a few advance auction setups like Carol suggested and was amazed that a date 7 days from today already had a lot of average views. I just hate to see any artist get dismayed that their work isn’t getting enough views.
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Thank you, Nan, for those words of encouragement and for the explanation.
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I find that the more I post the better my sales rate is. Also it helps a lot to post to facebook as well.
I’m a little bit concerned about the decline of the average views in total. I started out here last December; average views were in between 150-200. (See picture below). I reckoned the decline in the following months (during February - September the number of views dropped down from 150 to 75!) were influenced by the Holiday Seasons. However, even now the next Holiday Season is getting close, the average views are still going down; dropping below an average of 75. My own numbers being even lower as, I guess, somehow abstract paintings are getting less attention.
I can hardly believe this is a ‘seasonal thing’ any more. So it seems there’s a serious problem in the promotion of DPW. Even though promotion of DPW is not ‘our task’, I realize all of us (the artists) will benefit higher numbers of views, i.e. visitors, as such I would like to know what all of us can do to help increase these numbers.
I only joined in November 2017, so I don’t have a lot of perspective. I see that my views keep rising over time, so I assume that views accumulate as people view my work in my gallery. It seems that the more I publicize my work, the more views I get. I just started reposting some older work on front page and that seems to result in more views as well.
I print out little handouts for publicizing my work. I do a 4-up on regular paper with one or two small images and the url to my gallery on Paintworks. That seems to have helped my views a good bit. I hand them out at open studio events and leave them laying around for people to look at.
Like all my other venues, it seems that the more active I am on line, the more attention I get. I do not do social media. Just websites and a blog at the moment.
It has taken me a year to get 2 sales through paypal here, so hang in there.
Eduard, I posted this previously, but I will add it here again.
As far as your own views, that I would monitor & see where your view counts rise & fall, and with what images and what activities. I have seen my own view counts increase when I participate in the contests or challenges. Also, posting every day does increase my traffic (and often my sales).
And I do agree that we can all help to increase traffic on DPW by sharing, posting links, etc. in our social media & internet sites that are outside of DPW. Good Luck & please, don’t despair!
Hi Eduard (and others on this thread) - the graph you show here is very interesting. First of all, it is a testament to your productivity!
I am just wondering if the averages for older paintings do not automatically increase over time simply because those paintings have been around longer and statistically are more likely to be clicked on. Remember a very popular painting in Pinterest, linking through to DPW, could attract people to a certain artist’s site and from there they click a few times on paintings that are a year old.
I am not sure exactly how the averages are calculated, but if it is from clicks that originate from artists galleries (as opposed to just the front page), the the older average would most likely be higher for the reason stated above. A similar mechanism is most likely at play with your own paintings’ popup counts.
This means it only seems as if the average views are decreasing over time but in fact this is due only to the paintings having been around longer. I think this “downward sloping to the right” is mentioned in the Help on Traffic. In any event, maybe that helps?
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Looks like David just made an update and average numbers were simply removed from statistics. Probably he’s got tired to explain the meaning of them, but whatever the reason is, now there is no possibility at all to somehow compare performance of my artworks to the other artists’ paintings.
Well, probably those averages were too complicated for interpretation, but there is one piece of information that I would appreciate to have: a number of visitors to the “What’s new” page. This way I would be still able to see how my paintings attract viewers. Let’s say, my today’s piece got 20 new views total. Looks sad, especially if I knew that there were 2000+ people visiting the main page, but if there were only 200 visitors, then my painting might be not that bad, and the problem is rather in low number of visitors. I remember that at some point a total number of visitors to the site was shown on the main page, but then David removed it because the script slowed down the site performance. Maybe there is a different way to show this info? Add it to statistics, for example?
Hi Irina and others. Yes I also noted the change in the graph with some disappointment and my thoughts were along the same lines. The average may just be a trouble maker! But also I much preferred the scatterplot to the bar graph. On my iPad the bars overlap so much most of the information is lost. It may be that David is still experimenting with a new graphics library or something. Let’s keep watching.
I akso agree with your need to know the number of visits to the what’s new page. Or just some sort of relative indicator of where one stands in relation to the norm. Another thing that may be useful in the table to the left is to see which paintjngs have changed in number of views from say the previous day. That is, which oaintings are attracting attention.
I’ve been paying attention to this conversation about the traffic page and appreciate all the insight and feedback.
As the only member of the DPW development team, things change and improve only if I give it my attention. While I have long been aware of the confusion the traffic chart has caused, it has only been because of this feedback that I have been able to rethink it and clearly understand the issues involved.
Where is the Line Chart?
The traffic chart has long confused many of our members and, I fear, many of those who haven’t reported being confused, simply didn’t know they were misinterpreting the data. After years of it being this way I have sheepishly discovered that all the confusion was my doing because I was displaying the data incorrectly.
The traffic data represents the total number of clicks (view and other) that a given work of art has received on DPW and in the artist’s DPW Gallery. The vertical axis is the number clicks and the horizontal axis is the most recent date each work has appeared on the What’s New page. Each data point therefore represents a single work of art.
Presented as a line chart, however, the data looks more like the amount of traffic received over time. Further, since the points on the right represent works that generally had less time and exposure on DPW, and therefore fewer clicks, the line usually descended to the right, which understandably lead many artists to believe their traffic and thus exposure on DPW was decreasing over time, when it wasn’t.
I have now realized the data needs to be presented so a time-based relationship between the data points is not implied. The data points need to be shown disconnected so they can more easily be seen to represent individual and unrelated works of art.
I had thought a vertical bar chart would be the best (or least bad) presentation to achieve this goal, however thanks to Fritz’s feedback, I have switched to a scatter chart instead.
Where are the Artist Averages?
The other question is what happened to the artists’ averages? Presenting averages would make sense if the data did, in fact, represent traffic over time. It really doesn’t make sense, however, with the data representing clicks per individual artwork. This is because the clicks are on works of art over time, not clicks on a given day.
The only link in the old line chart between your data and the average data was the date your work and the work of everyone else that made up the average most recently appeared on the What’s New page. This really falls apart when much older work, with many clicks is reposted to the What’s New page, which it can be up to three times as often as every six months, and really skews the average. Unfortunately this happens more and more often.
There is Better to Come
As penance :-), I am going to rethink, improve, and expand the traffic feature in the coming weeks. I will keep the clicks per artwork that it always has had, as it offers insight into relative popularity, and I will add actual traffic over time data, as well.
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Thanks so much David for the excellent explanation and for your efforts in improving this useful feature of your site. I think the scatterplot is much better than the bar chart, and I hope others agree.
As a relative newcomer to DPW and also to selling my work on the internet there are a few metrics that are important to me: 1) Which of my paintings attract more attention than others; 2) is the interest in my work increasing over time; and 3) how is my work doing relative to DPW in general, without being overly influenced by a few superstar outliers.
I think the new scatterplot answers the first two. If you can think of a way to give us feedback on the third your site would be even better.
Thanks again for taking our feedback on board. I can see from the time in the USA you have put in a long day!! Here in New Zealand I am typing away in a balmy Sunday afternoon. 
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Thank you for the explanation David.
Love the scatter chart, it’s so cute! 
Thank you for clarifying the issues. The scatter plot is useful for me to see which works attract the most views. Those paintings are the ones that I try to analyze to see what creates the stronger attraction. Subject, composition, color? I paint what pleases me, but I don’t want to invest in a frame or do a larger version if I am the only person who enjoys the work. Without statistics, I have no way of evaluating the market demand. I assume if the audience likes it enough to click it, it might be a good idea to target marketing that image.
Then again, maybe all the clicks are other artists rather than shoppers. How can I tell? I know that I look at other artists’ work as an art appreciator, and sometimes comment as such. But my space is stuffed with my and others art already! So I rarely purchase anymore art.
Thank you David, for the explanation & the changes!
Hi David, I absolutely love how you have developed the DPW site. I do see what you mean about how it could be interpreted in different ways. I remember seeing data for one day that was way off, because that artist had their work on DPW for years, so it had collected thousands of clicks. Maybe there needs to be separate charts. One chart for “Total Clicks” and another chart “clicks for the auction period”? or a 24 hour period from the time it was posted?
Hello David,
initially, my work was getting the usual eyeballs. After that, two of my works which were scheduled to appear on two different days, simply were not published at all. I sent mail to Sophie but not before deleting my work. She has asked me to inform if there is a repeat of the situation. I am new to this site, and so do not know where the problem lies, is it in the way I am adding work to my gallery or whether it is the site itself, or whether it is a bug …I just don’t know. But, I have been painting, and not wanting to add to the gallery, I don’t know if I am disappointed or just disappointed…
Averages work when the work is published in the front page, when work does not appear on the front page at all, what is to be done? 
Hi, David - it would also be useful to see which paintings were on the DPW painting of the day. I get so many more ‘hits’ on paintings that get onto the FB page. If it’s easy to do maybe just a different color ‘dot’ on those paintings?
A few times when my work did not appear when expected I realized I had put the wrong front page date.
@Mary_Hubley, there isn’t currently a way to see a list of paintings that have been picked for our FB page, however, you can drill down on each painting in the artwork list to the left of the popularity chart and see its day-to-day view history, including if and when it was picked for our FB page, on the front page, and more. You can also see the total number of your paintings we have picked for our FB page on your analytics dashboard.