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?

[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.