On Counting Website Traffic

Logic Bomb writes: "The San Francisco Chronicle has an interesting article about measuring website traffic. This is kind of an obnoxious issue, but it means everything to commercial websites seeking investors. Apparently the figures reported by the sites themselves through analysis of server logs are often much higher than the ones given by firms like Media Metrix (whose numbers I see all the time in articles from Cnet and the like). The basic dispute is over whether sampling, a la Nielsen, is appropriate for the web. It seems counterproductive to purposely use an innacurate statistical measure when exact counts are readily available, but I can't imagine many things easier to fake than a server log. Anyone have a good idea about how to approach this?"

Comments

Re:Lies, damned lies, and proxies

[technos]

NOTE: By reading this post, you have agreed to run around the room which you are currently in, flapping your arms, and sqawking like a chicken.

Okay, I did it. Unfortunatly, I was reading your post at the same moment my boss was entering the cube, and I've been fired. Under the terms of the 'technos' AUP (As amended September 12, 2000), and UCITA, you are hearby notified that you owe me $28,941,285.42.

Referencing clause two of the AUP, this number reflects the sum of my maximum earnings potential until retirement age, as well as the cost of obtaining said employment (six years of college at a major University), as well as an additional 34% transgressive penalty and a 9% compounded cost-of-living increase.

You have ten business days to remit the sum, in whole, or I will be forced to submit a class B lien request against both your holdings and those of your employer in the State of Maryland.

Clause six clearly states you indemnify me against any legal malfeasance or action, so don't even try to get cuetsy with a countersuit. It has a binding compensation clause of $2,000,000.

Web server statistics are NOT for marketing!

[komet]

Where the fuck does the idea come from that your should show your web server stats to marketing/sales people? Because current programs are really just some measurements of technical data, useful for planning server loads and Internet uplinks, but not for demographic data. PHBs want something like this:

• Yesterday, 1308 people visited your site. Of those:
• 183 weren't paying attention at all anyway.
• 22 were your competitors.
• 318 were poor college students drooling over, rather than contemplating buying, your products.
• 139 were actually looking for pornography and left your site immediately.
• 38 were webdesigners stealing your HTML code.
• 133 were here to compare your prices with the competitors. Of those, 29 decided to buy your product.
• 84 were in your target demographic, but were so stoned at the time that they didn't read your sales pitch.
• 12 people actually bought something online.
• 18 people liked your product and went out and bought some offline.
• Of those 30 people who bought something, 28 sent the URL to a total of 56 friends to show off what they had just bought. Of those friends, 3 subsequently bought something.

Ok, so where's the software which can get that data out of your server logs?