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

Posted by Hemos on from the interesting-informationo dept.

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."

3 of 146 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Cookies? by howlatthemoon · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

  2. Uh, No... by EvilJohn · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

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  3. You can't: live with it by Stephen · · Score: 5, Insightful
    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).

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