The feature External Usage enables you to control where your assets are published thanks to a connection to Google. It may sound simple, and it is! With a single click, you will get a list of URLs’ where that specific asset has been published.
QBank can attempt to find usages of your assets on public websites. This is primarily a service for images and finding similar images or cropped parts of images. This will of course work with any type of graphic, be it logotypes, video previews, or document cover pages.
IMPORTANT: This is and Addon in QBank, Please contact your sales representative if you would like to get more information about the feature.
This service comes with a big disclaimer that it in no way guarantees detection, especially if the image has been altered, but it is fairly reliable at finding unaltered versions of an image on public, frequently visited website pages. The more exposed a website page is, the bigger the chance of the image being identified.
Finding external usages
External usages are identified per webpage, and grouped by the respective domain. To start identifying external usages, you will need to initiate a scan on your selected assets. You can scan once, or schedule recurring scans on a weekly/monthly basis. You can also select specific dates that you want a scan to be run, perhaps you've released some commercial banners for a product and a week after the release you want to see where the banners has been used.
Assets can be scanned as often as once every 24 hours, and while we don't have a specific max quota set at the moment, we do monitor the monthly usage and will reach out to you in case we see an excessive use of the service.
An external usage will be listed with a link to the page where it was identified, and usually also a direct link to the actual image itself. Due to the workings of modern websites, it is sometimes not possible to identify the link to the actual image, and since a major part of website content is tailored to the individual visitor and frequently changing, the image may no longer be visible on the page when you visit it.
When assets have been tagged with external usages, you can use the "External usage" filter in search queries to identify them.
Managing external usages
Each QBank user may subscribe to notifications for whenever an external usage is identified for an asset. You may not interested in being notified by usages on certain domains, for example you may wish to ignore your own media portal and only identify usages on third party websites. When that is the case, you can use the ignore feature to skip both listing and notifying about certain domains, or pages on a domain.
Unlike notifications, ignores are applied for all editors. When ignoring a domain or page, you can choose if you want to ignore the domain or page for all assets, for the current category of media that you're viewing, or only for the specific media you're viewing. The rule you choose will be applied and all editors in your QBank instance share the same ignore rules.
You can bring up the "Ignore dialog" to see external usages for a media that was ignored, and which rule that ignored it. From there you may "un-ignore" the usage, but bear in mind that you're actually removing the ignore rule that caused the usage to be ignored. This means that if you're removing a global or by-category ignore rule, you may also be un-ignoring usages for other assets than the one you're currently viewing.
