My problem with CTR is that keywords are found in the wrong place.  One problem is my name, "Adelaide", I get hits for any search related to the city in Australia. Someone looking for "adelaide cityscape" may see a photo of London.     Also there were the expressions in quotation marks, searches are reading individual words in an expression.  Like someone searching for "American Airlines" and finding an image that has "Varig Airlines" and "Latin American" in the keywords. 

I take the point!

adelaide cityscape shows 2 pics of London on the first page of otherwise correct matches
"adelaide cityscape" - no matches
adelaide city - first page of correct matches
"adelaide city"  correct matches

Changing your name to a pseudonymn dones not help as it still seaches on the photographers credit line.

I would have put essential keywords as "adelaide city" "adelaide cityscape"

It's never going to be an exact science, the only way I have found to increase CTR is to be brief. "golden gate bridge" etc. The search engine gives highest priority to the essential keywords, so it they are good your CTR should be above average anyway. Not sure how to deal with the photographer name problem, maybe Alamy could be more help.

Rgds

Oldhand

Fresh example: yesterday I had a view on woman lifting man. It so happens that is what my photo shows. But looking for photos of woman lifting man shows that although 'woman' 'lifting' and 'man' are relevant for most of the photos in the search result, very few of them show a photo of a woman lifting a man, which is almost certainly what the buyer was looking for.
I'm very much afraid that the keywording and search are what's making Alamy fall further and further back.
To be fair, in that particular search, istock fares no better, and, surprisingly, no-one appears to have added "woman lifting man" 'for their own use'.

On the flip side - you had the picture that they may have been looking for!

It's very difficult, without looking on the site I would imagine "woman lifting man" wouldn't get any matches. A client may type in [woman lifting man], or if it was me, woman lifting man. Probably all the images are accurately keyworded, but without disambiguation it's always going to be an inexact science.

It annoy's me as well, but as long as my CTR is higher than average and my pics on the first page ideally, I'm happy.

I once sat a keywording test for Alamy for fun. I can only describe it as very, very difficult. I was on the right lines, but to get to it right would have been beyond me on a regular basis. So much for doing things for fun.

Back to the grind...

Oldhand

True it is inexact and there will always be flawed returns.

And by the way, "S" does matter. If I have "cars" in the keywords and someone searches for "car" it's not a match.

Alamy do not employ stemming, for example, we do not automatically add plurals. So if you think both the plural and singular of a term is relevant you must add them both.

Alamy search at the present is exact words, by keyword field priority, word order, then word proximity, apparently (my intuition) match also considers number of matching words divided by total keywords. (less is more!) Over simplified, but "London Bridge" in Essential will display in a search way before "train bridge crossing river with barge water blue sky clouds near London" in Main.

Alamy is very straight forward about explaining these things:

http://www.alamy.com/contributor/help/captions-keywords-descriptions.asp

As usual, it's up to the contributor to make sure the keywords match the image, not that we can spam the fields and some search engine will guess the right match like some sort of psychic. All it does on Alamy is find words that match!

FINALLY! Been there for a year, almost gave up uploading because of no sales but maybe I'll focus a little more effort there after a $225.00 sale from a picture of Wild Lettuce flowers. Didn't even notice I had a sale on July 1st until today! Only have 114 images online. Would love to know the name of the magazine. Probably gardening or something like that.

Here's the info from the sale

Country: United States
Usage: Editorial
Media: Consumer Magazine
Industry: Retail books/magazines/newspapers
Sub-Industry: Miscellaneous
Print run: up to 2 million
Placement: Inside
Image Size: 1/4 page
Start: 24 August 2009
End: 31 August 2009

Where did you find the sales information?

Quote from: dbvirago on April 23, 2010, 15:20

Where did you find the sales information?

My Alamy
(then under "Sales Information")
Summary of Images Sold
(you may have to click a different statement period like 1 year or All)

The detail is only available for RM sales. 

Did you try Google Images and TinEye?  I have found 4 or my bookcovers through them.

Hi there - I got a sale there yesterday, probably the low fee relates to the agreement with UK national newspapers.

Country: United Kingdom
Usage: Editorial
Media: Newspaper - national
Print run: up to 2 million
Placement: Inside
Image Size: 1/4 page
Start: 26 April 2010
End: 27 April 2010
 $ 29.83
Total sales $29.83

My cut will be a grand total of $14. I saw the picture, and if I'd supplied directly through my own agency it would have been around $100 with no deductions. Things being as they are it is a sale gained rather than lost, as they would not have come directly to me for it, nor obviously taken my pic from their own library.

I remain equally delighted and frustrated in equal measures.

Oldhand