Comments on: Doing a number on Web site traffic

Content publishers and tracking agencies aren't always on the same page when it comes to Web metrics, which are key to a site's appeal to advertisers.

[inachu]

MLB info

Every pc at work I have seen that had malware on it only had cookies from MLB or websites from India or internal website.

Since our server was clean that leaves india webservers or MLB and I blame both and put a ban on both. Since then my network is nice and clean and trojan free.

[jchasin]

A View From the Other Side

Hi. I'm Josh Chasin, Chief Research Officer for comScore. A couple of things.

1. We always hear that site centric data actually reports a census of visits. The thing is, not all so-called "visits" are associated with visitors. Some quick examples: non-human traffic; RSS calls; tabbed browsing (if a user opens a browser and 5 tabs open simultaneously, each site logs a server call and thus a visit; us panel companies only log a visit when that darned human using the computer visits the site, by making the tab active.)

2. The biggest disparities between site and panel data are in the area of Uniques. There are many reasons why the two data sources differ, but it is instructive to understand the impact of cookie deletion, which we documented in a White Paper (go to our home page; you can't miss it.) Essentially, the disparity between site centric Unique counts and panel-derived Unique estimates can be pretty much entirely explained by the inflation of site centic numbers caused by multi-counting the same visitor if he/she shows up again having deleted the site's cookie.

To be clear: the differences in Uniques are a function of publisher data classifying a return visitor as a new one.

(Indeed, average daily Unique data from panels and site logs is far closer, because the impact of cookie deletion grows over the course of a month and is almost negligible for a day.)

3. On exclusion of cell-only households-- I agree. This is an egregious problem. But it only affects Nielsen, not comScore; in fact 19% of our panel comes from cell only households. I hope MLB finds our data to be more to their liking than that of our competitor. (And may I just say, Let's Go Mets!)

Cheers.

--josh--

[joebuff75]

Quantcast delivers!

I've become a big fan of QuantCast in recent months because it's
a free service, it uses a panel and has its own tracking codes for
a more accurate analysis. The stats are pretty close to my own
server logs and almost exactly the same as Google Analytics -
give or take a percent or two.

From my understanding a visit is counted in minutes and
pageviews. When somebody opens several browser tabs from
the same site, then the number of pageviews per visit might be
inflated but the visit length remains unaffected, and therefore
the overall visit number is accurate.

Before the dot-com bubble, I was able to afford getting traffic
stats through large companies (PCData) but it cost $30000+ a
year. QuantCast gives me the same information and more for
free. Back then, it seemed that you would only be included in
"official" traffic rankings when you were also a paying member -
- otherwise small networks were excluded from those ratings as
the audit companies had no way to link various sites to the same
publisher.

QuantCast allows you to group all your sites together to form a
network account and get aggregated traffic stats. This is very
important for small publishing houses with many sites. Using
this approach, my network of sites has a traffic rank of around
7600 of all web sites (1.1 million uniques/month:
http://www.quantcast.com/p-6btf0Pyh9xonk).

There is still room for improvement on QuantCast, though:

- calculating the ranking on a worldwide basis instead of
ranking according to U.S. traffic.

- a filter to exclude the sites in the adult business (to get a
ranking of advertiser friendly G/PG-rated sites)

- creation of sub-categories and filters, e.g. ranking by
male/female visitors (my audience is 75% female) which would
allow advertisers to easily drill down in the rankings to find
suitable sites.

I guess those features will be delivered over time... advertisers
should complement the data they get from comScore, Nielsen
etc. with other sources like QuantCast, Hitwise, Compete, Alexa
to get an overall picture of a site's traffic. Another possibility is
to check the Google Adwords traffic prediction tools for sites
that accept Adwords ads...

The more options there are, the better the understanding of
traffic patterns becomes...

Joe.

[modthocn]

But the problem persists for many other Web sites competing for advertising dollars in an environment where the difference between being ranked fourth or fifth in a category can directly impact the bottom line.

Being undercounted by the audience measurement firms costs publishers advertising deals and threatens their ad-based businesses. free psp games

[Free_DSi]

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and find it irrating, but there isnt much you can do but try SEO etc to eventually gain one over your rivals. The internet is a very competative marketplace now, and the search engines are the places to be in terms of marketing. You top a few kewords and you should be sorted.

[willo181]

Great article measurement accuracy is vital.

Just today I found several different measures of my site traffic none of which gel with my own stats.
Will
<a href="http://www.themarketingmentor.com">Internet Marketing Consultant</a>