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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."
I found this article to be rather insightful. I personally run a small IT/science-news site (in Finnish) and I'm really having a hard time figuring out visitors of the site. Of course I can get some data from the log analyzing software (awstats and webalizer are being used for the site) but it really doesn't tell me what I want. It seems that the website logs don't always tell the truth. For example I'm getting about 20-30 hits a day with a referrer pointing to a site that's a search engine for blogs (${god} knows why the site has been tagged as a blog) but browsing through the actual logs reveal the hits to belong to a indexing-robot of the site that's a little too enthusiastic.
The most reliable way to find out about the visitors on a given site would be a user survey, although not complete as not everyone would fill it out, but it would give an idea about the habits of your most frequent visitors. I, if I were an advertiser, would be interested in more than just number of hits and visits and most advertisers would be baffled by stuff like "we got XXXYYYZZZ HTTP requests last month". Personally I would prefer to advertise on sites with a well-built sense of community and an active userbase that's keen to interact with the website, when I browse a site for the first time or a site that I visit infrequently, I rarely click on banners or ads. I'm more prone to clicking ads on sites which I visit daily or so, it gives me a feeling of supporting the site I like and I just might buy something from the advertiser if they are offering something that I need, therefore focused advertising is the key, hence again you need to know your users.
Logs tell you numbers but you need the visitors themselves to tell you who they really are and how often they visit your site.
Their ISP killed their account after 3 reported strikes.
Then there's em3.net, a scumware site that tried this last year. Following the links triggered attempted spyware downloads.
(If anyone is truely interested I have a partial list at http://idunno.org/misc/referralSpammers.aspx)