Hits or Misses: Who is Your Website's Audience?

securitas writes "The Christian Science Monitor's Gregory M. Lamb wrote a story interesting to anyone who runs a website: How do you accurately and reliably measure the audience for your website? From the article: 'Most websites have no idea how many people view their content. This inherent fuzziness is causing problems for commercial websites, especially online publications desperate to make money from Internet advertising... How can you charge for ads when it's nearly impossible to tell advertisers how many people will see them?' The article discusses the flaws and problems with Nielsen/NetRatings and comScore Media Metrix - they grossly undersample workplace users - and the rise in the number of sites requiring user registration."

Comments

use cookies?

[Anonymous Coward]

I always just set a cookie with a tracking ID, and then use that to keep track of the anon user. counting the number of tracking cookies given out each day, and the time they were used for seems to work sufficiently for me... or is there some problem with that I don't know about?

Re:use cookies?

[PhxBlue]

Only when you consider browsers that let you reject cookies, such as Firefox. But then, that's more the web developer's problem than mine, since I'd just as soon remain anonymous.

Re:use cookies?

[Stephen]

Read the article. They are complaining that one user may read the content from work and from home, and so count as two users. One might also point out that sometimes two people may use the same computer, and only count as one person.

Re:Cookies?

[RetroGeek]

Call me oblivious, but wasn't this one of the reasons why cookies were created?

Using the Mozilla cookie control, I regularily go through my cookies. Anything that looks like it is coming from an ad site I delete and block.

Any site which I do not recognize gets the same treatment.

I have not had any problems from any site because of this.

Re:You shouldn't care how many people visit ...

[lukewarmfusion]

Your first line is that advertisers shouldn't care how many people visit... but then you go on to talk about how you increase traffic to your own website.

If your site uses an ad-supported business model, you (and your advertisers) should care how many people are visiting your site. Advertisers want to spend their money somewhere that they know will be seen.

The Super Bowl charges more for a 30-second spot than your local cable channel; that's because of the sheer number of people that will be watching. If you (and your advertisers) know how many people are visiting the site, then you can put some numbers to your business model - and that's a smart way to run a business.

Re:Isn't it obvious

[cshark]

No.

That's why the standard is per impression CPM (cost per thousand). One user even from home could generate hundreds of impressions if the content is interesting enough, and the pages are chocked full of useful ads!

Per click is another methodology, but until Google came along, it really wasn't the standard on the ad sales end. Still isn't outside of Google and the search engines.

That said, most web sites do know exactly what demographics are visiting their web sites and when. If it's important enough to buy software to do it, and most do, there are several useful software packages that come to mind. Web Trends is the first one I think of. That program in particular actually catches many of the problems described in the article, and it's not unusual. Many such programs have similar functionality.

Honestly, it would have been nice to see them do their home work before writing yet another scare piece.