Tech Wordpress plugin for thumbnail optimization by click popularity

[Forkbeard]

Hey, everybody. I know that it's impossible to run a thread here on GFY about WordPress plugins without the same two or three people (bots?) with commercial plugins for adult posting their often-irrelevant spam in the thread. But let's all try to just ignore that and proceed anyway.

Waaay back in the day of custom scripts for thumbnail TGPs, one of the common functionalities was the ability to track which thumbs were attracting the most clicks and display them preferentially, thus maximizing clicks for traffic trading purposes. It also had the mostly-accidental benefit of letting you see which kinds of thumbs worked best for your traffic, so you could make more like that.

There are a bunch of different purposes to which a person could put that tech to use in the Wordpress/blogging world. Banner sorting comes to mind, as does optimizing the featured images for posts that are going to be displayed in a tiled layout.

So I am trying to find plugins that use any version of the technology. (I'm pretty damned good at using plugins not quite how they were intended, but I'm way less good at coding from new in php. And I'm not currently in the market for any custom coding solutions; I'm looking for already-available tools to work with in doing my own custom site development.)

One obvious place to look would be in gallery plugins, which I mostly don't use. There are ten zillion of them out there, and trying to search them by features is really hard. But I would think that at least one of them must have a feature such that if there are fifty thumbs in a gallery, it counts the clicks and puts the most-clicked thumbs at the top of the gallery. I could pervert that functionality a dozen different ways. Does anybody know of a gallery plugin that has this feature?

There are a ton of "a/b testing" and "split testing" plugins out there. Lots of them are text-focused (no good here) or really cumbersome to set up alternatives; "a versus b" is not hard, but "which of these twenty performs best" is not possible unless you set up way too many 1v1 tests. Also most of these classs of plugins rely on presenting a different item to each successive site visitor; that's interesting, but not quite the same as presenting a bunch of stuff on the page and measuring which ones the dirty monkeys click most. Nonetheless, it's possible there's a testing plugin I haven't found that can do this; if so, I'd like to hear about it.

So, what say you? I'm basically only interested in plugins that are:

1) in the Wordpress.org plugins directory;
2) not specifically aimed at the adult industry; and
3) not just a front-end for somebody's off-site cloud service.

However, I don't really care what the original purpose of the plugin might be, if it incorporates any kind of thumbnail or banner sorting or optimizing by click popularity. Suggestions and recommendations please!

[just a punk]

A lot of WP templates allow to sort posts (their thumbnails like you call it) by click popularity (views count). Just place this just before your loop:

query_posts($query_string.'&v_sortby=views&v_orderby=desc');

That will do the trick.

[Forkbeard]

Thanks, Cyber. Sadly (unless I am misunderstanding something) counting post views doesn't tell us anything about the click popularity of the graphical elements in those posts, unless we engineer a site design where clicking on an assortment of featured images from different posts is the ONLY way to navigate to those posts. I could maybe do that, so I thank you for the suggestion. But am still hoping to find something that monitors clicks on graphical elements a bit more directly.

[just a punk]

Originally Posted by Forkbeard

Thanks, Cyber. Sadly (unless I am misunderstanding something) counting post views doesn't tell us anything about the click popularity of the graphical elements in those posts, unless we engineer a site design where clicking on an assortment of featured images from different posts is the ONLY way to navigate to those posts. I could maybe do that, so I thank you for the suggestion. But am still hoping to find something that monitors clicks on graphical elements a bit more directly.

Do you want to set the most clicked image in gallery as a featured image (thumbnail) of the post, or you want to sort the thumbnails inside the galleries?

[Forkbeard]

Originally Posted by CyberSEO

Do you want to set the most clicked image in gallery as a featured image (thumbnail) of the post, or you want to sort the thumbnails inside the galleries?

Neither one precisely. I'm only talking about galleries because I imagine that gallery plugins are one of the plugin categories where a plugin might exist that does the sort of thing I'm interested in.

But closer to "sort the thumbnails inside the galleries". I'm looking for any sort of plugin that exposes different/multiple images to the viewers, monitors which images get the most clicks, and reports that information usefully (sorting the popular ones to the top would be one way; bunging it into a custom key in wp_postmeta like WP-PostViews does with "views" would be another.)

Different plugin contexts where we might find this sort of functionality include gallery plugins, banner rotation/optimization plugins, and explicit a/b testing suites designed for testing numerous (not just two) options at a time. Or there could be other categories of plugin that I haven't thought of. It's the work the plugin does (not the product category the plugin author was targeting) that I'm interested in.

Hope this is more clear!

[just a punk]

Originally Posted by Forkbeard

Neither one precisely. I'm only talking about galleries because I imagine that gallery plugins are one of the plugin categories where a plugin might exist that does the sort of thing I'm interested in.

But closer to "sort the thumbnails inside the galleries". I'm looking for any sort of plugin that exposes different/multiple images to the viewers, monitors which images get the most clicks, and reports that information usefully (sorting the popular ones to the top would be one way; bunging it into a custom key in wp_postmeta like WP-PostViews does with "views" would be another.)

Different plugin contexts where we might find this sort of functionality include gallery plugins, banner rotation/optimization plugins, and explicit a/b testing suites designed for testing numerous (not just two) options at a time. Or there could be other categories of plugin that I haven't thought of. It's the work the plugin does (not the product category the plugin author was targeting) that I'm interested in.

Hope this is more clear!

So you are looking for a turnkey TGP-like solution for WP. That's can't be done via plugin. That have to be a special template (WP theme). I'm not aware about the existing ones but such a custom template will be rather expensive

[donedeal]

click popularity of the graphical elements in those posts,....

Sounds like the thumb casting option in smart thumbs.

Using cyberseo with either a grid thumb theme or a pinstyle theme is the closest ive gotten to a wordpress tgp

[Forkbeard]

Originally Posted by CyberSEO

So you are looking for a turnkey TGP-like solution for WP.

No, I'm definitely not looking for turnkey anything. I'm looking for plugins that do certain things that TGP scripts used to do, which are also things that I'd like to do on WordPress sites that are not particularly similar to TGPs.

Originally Posted by CyberSEO

That's can't be done via plugin.

I'm pretty sure it can. The only question is whether it has, and whether (given how difficult it is to search the universe of plugins looking for features that can be variously described) I can find any plugins that may exist.

Could you wedge php code to do this sort of thing into a custom template? Sure, you could do that. And somebody might have. And if they have, and that template is available somewhere, I'd be interested in hearing about that too. But the functionality I'm interested in is more likely to be plugin functionality than template functionality, at least IMO. I could of course be wrong about that too.

Originally Posted by CyberSEO

That have to be a special template (WP theme). I'm not aware about the existing ones but such a custom template will be rather expensive

I keep trying to explain, I'm not looking for a particular solution (which I could indeed hire done if I could afford that kind of talent). I'm looking for tools I can use to implement a whole range of related profitable ideas, all of which involve identifying the relative clickety attractivenesss of competing images. There's no inherent reason why this can't be done on the WordPress platform. And it strikes me as unlikely that somebody hasn't already done it. Could I be wrong? Sure. But it seemed worth asking.

[Forkbeard]

Originally Posted by donedeal

Sounds like the thumb casting option in smart thumbs.

That sounds right. I never had a Smart Thumbs license; I was using something called Comus back in the day, which had a similar set of features. But it eventually stopped being supported, and had security issues that never got resolved.

Using click tracking to sort thumbs or banners by popularity is such a useful idea that's been around so many years, I find it hard to believe it hasn't been implemented repeatedly in WordPress. It's just a matter of finding those implementations.

[ITraffic]

you are too wordy. summarize succinctly what you want in once sentence. if you are as a good writer as your claim you should be able to do that.

[Forkbeard]

Life is not succinct. Many things are complex. Oversimplification leads to confusion. Explanation is good.

And most importantly: the information I seek is unlikely to come from anyone who is uncomfortable with processing information in paragraph-sized chunks.

Thanks for the advice!

[Babaganoosh]

Originally Posted by ITraffic

you are too wordy. summarize succinctly what you want in once sentence. if you are as a good writer as your claim you should be able to do that.

Welcome to the Twitter generation.

[HowlingWulf]

I think I know what you mean but I'm not aware of any plugin for it.

WordPress uses a featured image for each post. You could have a plugin keep track of the number of times the featured image was displayed and the number of times it was clicked to get the CTR, along with a widget and/or shortcode to display results based on CTR.

[Forkbeard]

Originally Posted by HowlingWulf

I think I know what you mean but I'm not aware of any plugin for it.

Yeah, it's looking more and more like I'll have to write my own. Big job though, and I hate to reinvent the wheel. So I'll put a bit more effort yet into making sure there isn't an old plugin out there that has at least some of the functionality I need.

[sandman!]

i dont think what your looking for exists you basically want the main function of a tgp script as a plugin for wordpress

[Forkbeard]

Originally Posted by sandman!

you basically want the main function of a tgp script as a plugin for wordpress

Not really: TGP scripts trade traffic, accept and approve gallery submissions, track broken links, and do a dozen other things. Sorting images by click popularity is just one of the things they do, and far from the main one. Proof: there were lots of text-link-based TGPs and TGP scripts before the "thumbnail TGP" was even invented.