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

Re:Cookies?

[howlatthemoon]

What cookies don't tell you is who the person is, are visitors in the target demographic, are you missing an audience, etc. Of course, that said, I don't want to give that information out to most advertisers.

Uh, No...

[EvilJohn]

This is completely backwards. Infact, it's exactly the opposite. It's quite simple to tell how many people view your webpage, and hell of alot easier (and more accurate) than radio or TV.

This is the source of the problem with web advertising, your numbers fairly accurate and based on actual events, not some satistically questionable sampling method. There's little room for fudging.

Demographics on the other hand are a little more complicated. There, you actually have to ask.

---

Re:Uh, No...

[thogard]

It's quite simple to tell how many people view your webpage, and hell of alot easier (and more accurate) than radio or TV

No kidding. For the 1st time in the history of advertising since the invention of the shop sign, someone has a direct way to count how many people see the ads and how many of them respond in some positve way. The resutls aren't even close to the typical guesses used in the advertising game to sell ads so they simply say the web stats are wrong and go back to their old ways that say more comercials are good. Too bad the real stats show that consumers are overstaturated and ignore most ads. The problem is that consumers don't buy ads, its the large comapines that buy the ads and they don't know if its going to work or not so the compaines trust the ad providers to provide useful stats and then trust them even it it disagrees with market data. If you think some of the professional software is broken, take a look at real world ads. Some of them run away customers for years. For example Oral-B had anannoying warning sound on an ad for their toothbrushes and I hate it so much I'll never buy one of their products again and that ad ran a decade ago.

I was in a meeting room with a bunch of ad idiots that had just charged the company I worked for about a million dollars to put the www.$COMPANY_NAME.com on the tail end of some well recieved comercials that were about "building brand". They said it would increase our hits a thousand times. I had the logs and said it had increased the sites hits to about 20 times what my personal site got. The idiot then asked me how much I spent on advertising my site. One of my coworkers made some comment about it being millions less than what they charged and that the web hits had only doubled. The team of idiots then told us we must be getting our numbers from an unrelaiable ad auditing source and couldn't deal with the concept that our numbers were from the apache logs.

Re:Not too hard

[onion2k]

Mandatory reg. puts people off using the site in the first place (Why register if you can see the content.. If you can't see the content who knows if its worth registering for?).

IP addresses is half the problem (everyone behind one company firewall looks like 1 user).

Cookies are ok so long as your users are ok with you "tracking their browsing habits".

Its a tricky puzzle...

You can't: live with it

[Stephen]

You can't measure the exact number of human visitors to a website, any more than you can measure the exact number of people who read a magazine. With a magazine, two people may read one magazine. With a website, one person may come from two computers, or two people from one computer. The problem is only that people, especially advertisers, seem to expect that exact numbers are somehow possible. But they really need to match their metrics to the medium, and not try and force the medium to fit print-media analogies.

Anyway, the exact numbers don't really tell you anything. You really need to know the differences between two sub-populations (are visitors from pay-per-click ads or visitors from standard search results more likely to buy?). A program which makes this sort of comparison easy will give you far more insight than one which tries to get the total number of visitors closer to some mythical "true" number.

(I am the author of analog and CTO of ClickTracks, but I'm writing in a personal capacity).

This isn't rocket science!

[peterdaly]

Tracking unique visitors?
Not that hard if small margin of error is ok.

Charging for ads when you don't know how many page views you will get?
What about CPM (cost per 1k impression) rates? Want 10k impressions? Pay for 10k impressions.

Target demographics?
How about track what article topics are popular, how many return readers per topic, etc?

These are not that hard to do with the right people. The guy who writes the "techie column" in many cases is not the right person.

I guess if you think like a newspaper, you end up with these problems seeming impossible to figure out.

Have I lost my marbles, or is this really not that hard?

-Pete

Oh come on!

[peterdaly]

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.

My wife and I both read the same article/section in the newspaper we got yesterday, even though we only got a single paper. (We "logged" 1 impression even though 2 were made.)

I understand that is the opposite of what you suggest, so...

Not only that, but we had some sections delivered to us that we (gasp!) threw out without even reading even though we may have been part of the target demographic. (We "logged" 1 impression even though 0 were made.)

And the web is different how?

-Pete

I wish Internet advertisers would learn...

[Xugumad]

I'm not going to click on your banner. Nope. Not a chance. Not happening.

It's not that I'm not interested in your product. Online adverts I see actually tend to be:

1. Something unavailable to me (wrong country).
2. Something of no interest to me.
3. Something I own already (this happens a _lot_ with Gamespy).

But that's not the point. The point is, I'm at the web site because I'm looking for something, and it's probably not your product. When watching TV, I never watch an advert, and immediately decide to research/buy that product. At best I'll make a mental note to have a look out for information on it later, in most cases I won't think about it until I'm looking for that kind of product, at which point I'll probably remember your advert.

An example might be easier. I frequently see adverts for car insurance. I don't drive, for a variety of reasons, but if I was going to learn and buy a car, I'd probably start calling around the companies whose names I remembered from adverts. Well, actually I'd Google for a comparison site, but lets pretend I'm too lazy to do that, okay?

Oh, also, pop-ups/unders are a really good way of persuading me to avoid your company, your advertiser, and whatever site I got the pop-up/under from.