How much traffic? Depends who you ask
Cory Bergman October 21st, 2007
NYTimes.com has a good story on the continuing conundrum behind accurately measuring online traffic. For example, Style.com says 1.8 million unique users visited the site last month. Comscore said it was 421,000. And Nielsen-Netratings say it was 497,000. “It’s interesting that people keep talking about (the internet) as much more accountable than other media, but we’re not finding that to be the case yet because there’s no agreement on metrics or accounting methods,” said Jack Wakshlag, chief research officer at Turner Broadcasting System. Well, that’s not really true — the internet is much more accountable than TV, even with the metrics issues, because it’s an interactive medium — but the industry needs to come together on a solution. (Meanwhile, I think it’s a little funny that the NYTimes.com story uses the word “hit” in the headline.)
5 Comments Add your own
1. James Cridland | October 21st, 2007 at 10:30 pm
I blogged about this a while back (my link is a URL to it); using the stats that I have for my medium-traffic website. It seems that some services underestimate the traffic quite astoundingly.
comScore is an almost fraudulent operation, according to my own research: in particular, workplace reporting in the UK has so little data flowing into comScore’s computers, the figures aren’t worth basing any decisions on whatsoever.
2. invitedmedia | October 21st, 2007 at 11:49 pm
reporting from molokai!
i often cite alexa and get taken to the cane fields (which are history here nowadays).
in doing so, i’m simply using them as an overall cross reference rather than for actual numbers.
i think the argument the last time i mentioned alexa was it only counted those who had the alexa toolbar installed. fair enough.
but why then… do almost all local tv web channels show a decline y-o-y but youtube and google do not???
matter of fact, in the case of ib/cnn- it is very demonstrable the day they hooked up. and nearly every huge story that a local covers and cnn gives homescreen placement delivers a large bump in “hits” and thereby in the graph which fades as the story circulates.
i wouldn’t discount alexa any more than any other service.
3. Joe | October 22nd, 2007 at 7:38 am
I work for a fairly large company that has properties related to sports gambling.
As a result, the only trustworthy traffic monitoring service we have found is Hitwise, since it generates it’s reports from actual web traffic logs.
Why?
Because panel-based services, such as Neilson and Comscore rely to a large part on the habits (and honesty) of the panel member. And do you think panel members are likely to openly admit to browsing porn or gambling sites while that are participating in a panel? Of course not. So you get a result that is filtered and shaded by the very fact that participants are participating.
So, if you are interested in seeing results based on the type of sites that people who participate in panels would admit to browsing, then Neilsen and comscore are perfect for you.
But if you want to see the actual sites that people are looking at, I think Hitwise seems to give the most likely numbers.
4. Gorman | October 22nd, 2007 at 7:57 am
At least in my experience, Alexa has gotten downright goofy. We used to use it with the obvious caveat. What’s frustrating is that in a market of three WorldNow stations, all using the same reporting system, we still had to rely on client intel to even get a hint of what the other sites were pulling in.
5. JoeMo | October 22nd, 2007 at 10:35 am
not sure why people aren’t just running log file analysis to determine their page views. Download AWStats or purchase Sawmill, Mach5’s or any other log file analyzer. Configuration is pretty easy and it will give you more realistic numbers, there isn’t much you can do about your pages getting caught in corp proxies unless you have an integrated analytics tool, when you get in that deep things start to get complicated but…..
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