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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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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?
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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 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.
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.
"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.