(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."

Comments

Re:Facebook is Bad Example

[TubeSteak]

Actually, FaceBook kinda garauntees a minimum number of ad rotations.

It is 2,500 for large schools or "you are targeting a small school where there may not be enough people or traffic to display your Flyer 2,500 times a day. In this case, we will display your Flyer as many times as we possibly can."

If you're a registered user, I think it's something like 10,000 impressions a day, with the same caveat as above.

Re:How do you measure profits made?

[HarvardAce]

Now, how do you measure profits made from advertising, because as I understand it, that is the issue under discussion here.

Determining the profit from a particular advertisement is actually quite easy in the online world. You can give each advertisement its own identifier and track the visitors from a particular advertisement and see how they relate to your sales. This is not perfect -- some people will have cookies turned off or will come back later, and perhaps some of these customers would have come even if they didn't see an advertisement, but in general this will be an accurate depiction of your profits from a particular advertisement.

The real issue is determining the potential of a (future) advertisement on a particular site, or determining the overall worth of a site based on the number and demographics of the site's visitors. This is a far more difficult question to answer. The best way to do this would be to gather the information from the existing advertisers themselves, but no advertiser in their right mind would want to freely share that information to other external entities.