Slashdot Mirror
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."
By height.
$30 Off All Plans: Use code TRIPLESAWBUCK
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?
I dont know what the real strategy of most online newspaper websites is, but they seem to follow this pattern:
1. Make content available online, free of cost
2. Wait for people to start using and monitor the growth in number of hits
3. Reduce the website response to a crawl with mind numbing popups, flash ads, quick time ads, and generally anything that would make sure the user "spends" more a few minutes on the homepage
4. Wait for most users to go away to some other website.
5. The few braves who remain - force them to register and read all the content, since you want to chart your users by demography.
6. Finally, now make most of the content premium - based upon the data collected in step 5, however inaccurate it is. Flood the site with more ads, if possible
7. Moan and bitch that there is no revenue generated.
8. Repeat cycle
http://efil.blogspot.com/
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.
may think their audience is a bunch of nerds, but in reality its a bunch of suave playboys that get to have sex with many hot women. I suggest they make the appropriate content changes.
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.
- - - - - - - - - - -
I am a programmer. I am paid to produce syntax not grammar. Deal with it.
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.
---
Less Talk, More Beer.
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...
http://twitter.com/onion2k
I would put a CGI page counter at the bottom of every page. I think the one with flame numbers works the best for this, but the digital looking on also works well.
Great ideas often receive violent opposition from mediocre minds. - Albert Einstein
i dont care who looks at my site as long as my statistics page reports more than just me.
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).
11.0010010000111111011010101000100010000101101000
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.
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
Soccer Goal Plans
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)
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
Soccer Goal Plans
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.