Using Photobucket Stats With eBay

Note: The Photobucket.com site has been redesigned since this hub was published. The STATS menu seems to have disappeared! You can still see a "Public Stats" view counter in your User Profile, but any graphs and detailed information seems to be gone. I emailed Photobucket tech support about this and received (on 2/22/13) the following response: "...The image/linking stats feature is currently not available on the new Photobucket..."

Photobucket.com is a great free service to use if you sell on eBay and want to know which of your item images is the most popular. I use Photobucket for image hosting to save on eBay fees and because I know that all of my photos will be safely archived there once I upload them. Off-eBay image hosting allows me a bit more flexibility when designing my eBay ads. With a little HTML, I can easily add one or more photo links anywhere in the eBay ad.

Snails and Stats

A couple of weeks ago I grabbed the digital camera, went outside and shot a few pictures of a brown garden snail. The photos turned out fabulous and I posted them on my blog. Using Photobucket stats I could then see if anyone was taking a look at my beautiful pictures! The first few days after I posted them there were a handful of views, or "hits". Then suddenly there was a spike and one of the snail photos had 256 hits! The following day 301! Then 260, 251, and 223! This kind of spike usually occurs when someone links to your photo from an external site. Needless to say, I was happy that my little snail pic was getting so much attention!

If you sell on eBay, you can use the Stats tool in Photobucket to find out which of your item photos is most popular with the viewers. This might help you decide which photo to use as a gallery shot. Or, if you have many similar images, the Stats graph might help you narrow down the images to the best few to post in you ad.

For your enjoyment, I have linked to the snail photos below. Oh, and I still haven't determined who linked to my photos. That remains a mystery...

PDXBuys