Your Admin Area Homepage is generally the first page you see when you log into your PhotoShelter account. Located under the Home tab, here you can view general website and account analytics, learn about what’s new at PhotoShelter, and get quick access to tools that will help you make the most of our service.
The panel on the left side of the page will allow you to navigate through the different sections of the Admin Area Homepage.
Overview
“Overview” houses your at-a-glance website and PhotoShelter account analytics. Here you will find data on unique website visits, top traffic sources, top locations, basic account information, and any relevant sales updates.
The data you see in the Overview section comes from a mix of sources. Most of it is Google Analytics data that we collect for your site, and the rest is account and sales information that we store in our system.
Note: You must have made at least one sale through your PhotoShelter website in order for the Sales card to appear.
The data pulled from Google Analytics can be defined as follows:
- Total visits
- Equivalent to Google "sessions." Google defines a session as a container for all the activity that occurs when a user visits your site.
- Unique visits
- Equivalent to Google "users." Google tries to lump the activity of multiple sessions together, if they suspect that activity all came from a single person. This is meant to give you a more accurate accounting of how many different people really visited your site.
- Time on site
- Average duration of sessions.
- Bounce rate
- The percentage of visitors who navigate away after viewing only one page.
- Sources
- Where a user was when they clicked a link to your site. "(direct)" means the user may have typed the URL into the address bar, clicked on a bookmark, or clicked a link in an email.
- Browser, Device
- Which browser or device the visitor was using to reach your site.
- Locations
- An estimation of where the visitor was located. The accuracy is set to "region,” which in the US usually means state. "(not set)" means Google wasn't able to capture data information from the visitor's IP address.
Note: Some sampling of this data occurs, which can account for a slight variation between the different statistics. The goal of this information is to provide an overview of trends for your site. More information about how sampling works can be found here.
Unless otherwise noted, the statistics you see are aggregated from the previous 30 days. If your account is new, or your site has not received traffic in some time, you may see “Not available” on some or all of the cards in your Overview tab. Once data becomes available it will appear automatically. In an effort to provide the most complete information possible, all stats are updated nightly.
Interested in learning even more about the activity on your website? Google Analytics is the industry standard in web analytics, and will offer custom goals, real-time events, and a lot more. We make it easy to integrate Google Analytics into your PhotoShelter site; learn how in this tutorial.
Already using Google Analytics? You may find that some of the numbers in your Overview tab do not exactly match what you see in your GA account. There are small differences in the way our accounts are configured - and in the amount of sampling that takes place - that can cause a slight mismatch to occur.
Resources
“Resources” contains everything you need to stay up-to-date and in-the-know with PhotoShelter. Here you may find quick access to news and announcements, the PhotoShelter blog, our most recently released free guide, our upcoming webinar schedule, newly launched products and features, and more. Newly added cards will display an orange triangle in the upper right corner. (Members in trial may see a set of cards unique to the trial experience.)
Recent Work
Easy access to your last 5 most recently modified PhotoShelter galleries.
Refer-a-Friend
Click Refer-a-Friend to find your unique referral code, along with four convenient ways to share it on social media. (It pays to tell your friends about PhotoShelter; you get money when they join! Learn more here.)