New Setting: Auto-delete Galleries
For many photographers, their online galleries (through Instaproofs) provide their business with a secondary source of income. But how long should you expect your galleries to generate revenue, and what should you do with them afterwards?
The answer to the first of these questions is fairly straightforward; an average gallery is heavily visited for the first 3 - 4 weeks after it’s published, and it receives 73% of its lifetime order volume by the end of its first month. From there the numbers go downhill pretty quickly, and they look something like this: month 2 receives 10% of the orders, month 3 receives 5.2%, month 4 receives 3.1%, month 5 gets 1.6%, month 6 gets 1.5%, and in month 7 the orders drop to just 1%.
Wondering about that 2% bump in month nine? We previously enforced a 9-month gallery display limit, and many of our users have continued with that tradition on their galleries even after the limit was removed from our system. The bump is the result of our automated Gallery Expiration emails that are sent out as the galleries expire.
So how long should you keep your galleries up? That’s entirely up to you, but one thing to keep in mind is that setting the expiration date several years into the future will generally result in fewer sales and lower overall revenue per gallery. The reason for this is that if your clients don’t feel a sense of urgency to make a purchase, they won’t have as much of a desire to do so. We recommend keeping your galleries up for a minimum of 30 days, and a maximum of 12 months. (Very few galleries are generally visited after the 12-month mark.)
Once a gallery has expired you can either leave it stored on your Instaproofs account, or you can delete it. Some photographers choose to delete their galleries in order to conserve their subscription space, while others choose to continually upgrade their subscriptions as their gallery count grows and as their storage requirements increase. Either way we support you in your decision, but if you fall into the group that would prefer to delete their older galleries, our new auto-delete setting should come in handy. Here’s how to set it up:
Navigate to the Photos » Preferences page within your account.
Click the “Advanced” button on the top-right corner of the page.
Scroll down to the “Automatically Delete Your Galleries” setting.
The auto-delete options range from “15 Days After Gallery Expiration” to “180 Days After Gallery Expiration.”
Save your changes
And that’s all there is to it. With this setting enabled your galleries will automatically clear themselves out as they hit the timeline you’ve selected. If you prefer to leave your galleries up instead, that’s no problem either; simply select the “Disabled - Do Not Auto-delete” option.
Have questions? Shoot us an email at support@instaproofs.com.