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(Mis)Tracking Web Traffic
PreacherTom writes "Online advertising is considered by many to be the most dependably trackable ad medium of all time, with revenues expected to grow to $16 billion in this year alone. However, companies are finding that competing methods of measuring web traffic are giving contradictory results. Since advertising revenues are based directly on the traffic developed, this news could mean serious trouble. For example, valuations for startups such as Facebook and YouTube appear to be doubling every few months, but those numbers are based on traffic figures that could be misleading."
I'm not sure it matters. I advertise my own businesses on the web, and I accept advertising on my sites. I've sold numerous ads just for my site for repeat customers who realize I give them more than they pay out of supporting my site. I support some sites repeatedly because those sites make me a profit for what I invest.
If you're a big company, you gauge your profits NOT on what others say but what you actually witness through numbers paid and profits made. If you don't make a profit, the traffic reports mean NOTHING. If you make MORE profits than you were expecting, the traffic reports mean NOTHING.
Most advertisers already know this. If they're complaining about false traffic statements, they're not working hard enough. They basically are trying to automate something that still needs human intervention -- for now.
Facebook and MySpace and YouTube are terrible places to advertise, in my experience. The visitors you get are completely worthless (in my businesses) because they don't convert to sales. On the other hand, that whole "long tail" idea works for me -- I advertise on the smallest blogs, the tiniest forums, the most niche communities, and those consumers thank me for supporting their communities by buying my products and services. I look at the traffic figures of the largest sites and realize "These numbers do not tell the truth about convertibility."
My link below takes you to my sites, and some slashdot readers say I am a spamming troll. I'm not. MOST slashdot readers who come back to my sites already block my ads (as I request that they do!). I post my links for a different kind of profit -- the profit of gained information my my readers and sharers, including those who oppose my views. The ads on my sites are for people who find me via search engines, who are looking for products, and who get those products from the advertisers. The advertisers who target me directly aren't concerned that I only have an Alexa rank of 200,000-400,000 and a PageRank of 5-6. They care about my targetted market, people who are interested in what I talk about, and what my ads sell.
My advertisers (and readers) are also free to look at my site statistics (sitemeter is open on my sites). This tells them who is coming -- google searches, not MySpace losers. This makes my sites more valuable to products that are in-line with what I "preach" daily.
General traffic figures are useless.
Then again, who cares if the marketing drones of the world want to live in a fool's paradise? That's exactly where they belong!
Oh, and BTW - FIRST POST!
It seems every FM station used to claim on the air they were the number one station. They always clipped the bit which should have continued, "in male age group 20 to 25, we suck hind tit in all others."
With fake clicks and hijacking by mal/spy-ware, I'd be hard pressed to believe anything other than actual sales figures and even then with the hijacking the question is, 'who's ad led to the sale?'
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
Do my eye's decieve me? You used the words 'misleading' and 'advertising' in the same writeup. Surely those words don't belong together!
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Vancouver housing sucks
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..and this wasn't patently obvious from the 1st day they started using banners back in the mid 90s? If they're just figuring this now, then marketers really are fools.
I told you a million times and I will tel you again. There is a fraction of real customers that corresponds to unique IPs. And cookies are not reliable. Check out my study, which is almost complete at this point. Results would be available next week.
As Benjamin Disraeli (or Mark Twain, or was it Lord Courtney? who knows...) might have said: "There are three kinds of lies: lies, damn lies, and web analytics."
How is this "serious trouble"? Not to be a troll or anything, but why does it matter that much if web advertisers have inaccurate figures on their incoming traffic? Especially in a world that readily embraces advertisement and popup blockers?
/* No Comment */
We don't think you are a troll, dada21, we simply believe you are an amazing man. A man who has not just knowledge, but personal business experience in whatever the topic of the day might be. A man who is so full of self-importance he fails to see the that libertarianism is just yet another Utopia, that gold is just another bubble market.
Facebook is a poor example, because their advertising model makes no sense to begin with. You pay a fixed price for rotation on a particular day, but you have absolutely no idea whether that will be 1 impression or 1 million impressions. It all depends on how many other people pay for that particular day. Given this, the amount of traffic the site receives doesn't really impact the value of an advertising dollar as much the number of advertisers for that day does.
Just a thought :).
So you have to factor that into account for the amount of "hits" that you're getting. If that's your metric.
[this is a repeat comment of mine from similar story. to do: make a list of repeated "insightful" comments from myself and others, such as 'ISP egress filtering for valid source ip addresses']
If you need text styles to communicate then you don't have a message.
So what's there to fix?
Gentoo Linux - another day, another USE flag.
So who the hell is actually clicking on all these online advertisements?
Who is actually responding to and buying things from spam emails?
I just don't understand how these kinds of things can be profitable, given that I've never met anyone dumb enough to fall for them. I certainly have almost NEVER seen an internet ad and said, "hey that's just what I'm looking for! CLICK."
I mean, I understand that it has value in the sense that it puts logos in front of peoples faces and reminds them about products and such, but where is the direct value in online advertising? No one honestly clicks on website ads on purpose.
They are really giving 'inconsistent' results. 'Contradictory' is a much more specific term.
The interpretations of two of the sets of results might be contradictory, but the results themselves are only inconsistent.
You said: If you're a big company, you gauge your profits NOT on what others say but what you actually witness through numbers paid and profits made. If you don't make a profit, the traffic reports mean NOTHING. If you make MORE profits than you were expecting, the traffic reports mean NOTHING.
Great. Now, how do you measure profits made from advertising, because as I understand it, that is the issue under discussion here. You have taken the problem and restated it without adding anything of value to the discussion. I think you must not have read the article. How do you measure profits accruing from one advertising source over another? If you have some new and better way of doing that, you could make a million. If you don't, well, you have added nothing to the discussion except to restate the problem.
Sorry if that sounds harsh, I don't mean it to.
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
The most reliable form of web traffic measurement is reported ad impressions from a reputable 3rd party like DoubleClick. They do a fine job of eliminating bots and spiders (unlike log files) and only meaure an impression once an ad is served. Eliminate pop-ups and unders (which our sites do not take) and one can get a true measurement of traffic. If you have on average 2 ads per page on your site and monthly ad impressions served is 100,000, then you have 50,000 monthly page views. Sure you are still in effect undercounting when you factor in ad blocking, etc....but what do investors and VCs really care about, the ability to generate revenue. Ad impressions are the true way to factor that in and provide a fair measurement of traffic. ComScore and Neilsen are antiquated measurements of traffic, how many Slashdot users out there would download ComScore software to be a part of a web "panel"??? I don't think many of us would do that.
Remember the horrible old days when Webalizer stats were being misinterpreted wholesale? I inherited the primary coding responsibilities for a large consumer health site. It was about 10,000 static html pages and the site relied on Webalizer "hits" for years. Even reported them as such to the large pharmaceutical companies that sponsored the site. After we converted the site to being MySQL driven and actual page views were accurately recorded, the sponsors, editors and project managers FLIPPED. Like it it was the programmers fault that they had been so stupid all of those years....and perhaps acting fraudulently towards the advertisers. Mercifully, I worked on other angles than stats, but the other programmer caught hell for a year.
I'm sure others in the audience have similar horror stories.
my live is swamped with advertising, on television, radio, roadside bill boards, on the sides of buildings, in the various stores i shop at, etc...
with the above paragraph so plainly true dont you think it would be natural for users with the knowledge to set up their web browsers to block as much advertising and web bugs as possible? (i think so and i did so)...
Politics is Treachery, Religion is Brainwashing
So whaddayou lookin at? Go download your free mp3...
http://www.bitworksmusic.com/
BitWorksMusic.com -- odd tunes for odd times
"The advertisement is the most truthful part of a newspaper." - Thomas Jefferson
Web advertising statistics have been manipulated and misleading since the beginning of the dot com era. While the internet advertising makes it easier to track usage statistics more accurately, site owners have strong incentive to lie. Furthermore, 1000 impressions != 1000 impressions.
There are lots of different tricks. If you selling by the impression, you can move the ad to a less visible spot on the page. You can also commit outright fraud, and just release the wrong numbers. As we've seen, clicks can be manipulated by bots. Internet advertising is more than anything about conversions and sales. How many people make it to your web page, and actually do something. If you're smart, you'll adjust your ad buys accordingly and ignore misleading statistics.
When people advertise they don't expect, well shouldn't expect, people to rush to the website/ place of bussness and buy what they are selling.
For example when McDonalds shows a TV ad they don't expect people to drop whatever they are doing and rush to buy a Bigmac. What they are aiming for is people to think about McDonalds when they are actualy shoping for fastfood.
The same is true if web ads, for example the dice.com ad at the top of this page isn't hoping that when people see the ad that they quit their jobs and search dice.com for a new one.
Companies relying on automated tracking scripts to show ware to spend advertising dollers are just asking for problems.
This article is from October 23rd, 2006?
What about click fraud? But yes, the real issue is determining the value of a potential advertisement, which is determined by traffic to a proposed advertising site. So, why did Dada get marked as insightful? He, as I mentioned, said nothing of use. I'm sure his answer would be something along the lines of "The free market fixes everything!"
Perhaps advertising cooperatives like the almond growers have, run by the advertisers, freely sharing information about potential ad sites would work. There we are, free market solution, free of charge. Funny how the most efficient free market solutions end up looking a lot like socialism. Only not enforced by an external agency, of course.
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
This just in:
The new numbers show noone actually reads slashdot. All comments are posted by long a forgotten script that posts a random jumble of verbiage from Wikipedia, and jumbles it even more, so it seems to begin to make sense.
Have you read my journal today?
I haven't seen one in months. Thanks to Firefox and AdBlock Plus. All these advertising types who want to turn the web into a bunch of TV channels can go pound salt as far as I'm concerned. Ads? Block early and block often.
How many shards is Warhammer Online going to have?
/.ers:
One, like EVE Online, or eleventy bajillion, like World of Warcraft?
Side rant for
I don't like the fact that WoW is called a Massively Multiplayer ORPG when it's got tons servers. Not one massive one. So it's very difficult to play with your friends if they started on server Y and you started on server X and you're not allowed to transfer your character to their server, and they're unwillling to play on yours - or some other scenario. Whereas EVE has one server. Tranquility. If you play EVE, you play with everybody else playing eve. One economy, one server with all your friends and enemeies.
And for the record, I'm currently subscribed to - and playing - both EVE and WoW.
Question everything
This is the same issue that direct marketers have dealt with for years, just in a new outfit. Unless you can track down to "paid-for sales", and then accurately derive the total value of that sale (after all the associated costs of making the sale, advertising included), you know *nothing* about the effectiveness of your advertising. After 20 years of experience with so-called marketing experts, I can say for certain that most do not put in the effort to know what marketing is working for them, and what is just sucking up the money. Once you track to the total profit from each of your sources, the claimed impressions is irrelevant. Some exceptions are tied to branding and building product awareness - you may be willing to lose moeny to sway an influential niche market - but you should still know how much money that costs. Most have no idea.
...about how profitable news manipulation is for governments and large corporations who influence governments and own the news media (among their other investments). People will say it doesn't work on them, but in the long run and for enough people, it obviously does.
It's like they go out of their way to call it advertising, but if truth be told, all of it is some form of brainwashing/psycyhological influence.
...advertising statistics have been manipulated and misleading since the beginning of...
...time...
"According to Advertising Age a list of heavy hitter marketers are demanding third party audience data for Web sites. They will no longer pay sites for ad impressions unless they've been audited by a third party. And by 2008 they insist that online publishers have someone certify their processes for measuring ad-impressions.
This is easier for the big publishers. They have the money to spend to invest in comScore and HitWise to audits of their sites. However, when you travel down the Long Tail of content, this is going to make it harder for bloggers and podcasters to generate ad revenue from the big advertisers. The advertisers understandably want accountability. The problem is, individuals can't afford to pay to have people audit our traffic. Worse, I doubt if even some of the blog advertising networks will be able to foot the bill either." - Steve Rubel
I represent Compete, Inc. To date, Compete has limited its information to clients, but on Nov. 1st we will be releasing a publicly available service called "SnapShot". The service will feature 13 month trend analyses on any and every site our member community has ever visited... Think Alexa on steriods.
In the interim, you can find single month Compete metrics through our toolbar which is in Beta, and can be found at http://toolbar.compete.com/
Cheers!
There is no point of have millions of visitors to your website if they do not convert to sale. As mentioned earlier advertising with smaller niche sites converts well and I must admit they will cost less.
Bhavesh
Source to top search engine ranking