Saturday, June 03, 2017

Google Local: 300K Views, More Photo Diversity

I am now over 30% of my way to my goal of one million views for my photos on Google Maps. I figured out a few things.

I was paging through other people's photos on Google Maps, and I realized something, I was seeing the photos Google wanted to show me, not the ones I necessarily wanted to see. So how could this help me figure out why my interior photos seem to be doing so much better? Well, it hit me -- Google has exterior photos from its own mapping. I might argue that they're better off with a well-framed photo that shows exactly what you're looking for, but the algorithm doesn't reward that.

At the 100K and 200K thresholds, about 70% of my views came from photos with 10K or more views. That's down to 63% as I have only one new photo with 10K views. I think that's because I have a lot of recent, popular photos that have not yet crossed that point -- I have four photos between 8K and 10K. Still, let's look at my star performers.
#7 (was #6) Rubio's, San Diego, CA, 17,695  views, August 2016. (Was 17,375 last time.)
#6 (new) Dollar Tree, Chantilly, VA, 20,138 views, April 2017. This has garnered an astounding number of views in a short period of time. I have other pictures of Dollar Trees that look almost identical, and have been popular -- but not this popular.

#5 Wendy's, Chantilly, VA, 23,646 views, August 2016. (Was 22,665 last time.)
#4 (was #3) Jumping Jack Sports, Ashburn, VA, 26,142 views, January 2017. (Was 24,891 last time.)
#3 Office Depot, Bowie, MD, 31,281 views, December 2016. (Was 22,854 last time.) This one continues to get a lot of hits, unlike  #2, #4, #5 and #7. I can only assume pictures continue to get hits until more recent ones taken by other users bump them. Perhaps I should re-take ones if I revisit formerly popular locations?
#2 (was #1) Arby's, Beltsville, MD, 34,414 views, January 2017. (Was 32,053 last time.)
#1 Michaels, Bowie, MD, 42,040 views, December 2016.  (Was 30,952 last time.)

Every week Google e-mails me my top six photos -- the Dollar Tree one was the only one that ranked in May, so my road to 400K is in the new photos. It would be nice to take interesting pictures that people wanted to see -- I am thinking that next time I have a sit-down meal, taking a picture of the food could be worth trying.

No comments: