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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.
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
No, misleading and advertising are very common... the surprise here is that its the advertisers that are being mislead. Its like a Soviet Russia thing.
Alright, I admit it... once... just once... I punched the monkey.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
There's a difference between the people clicking on spam emails and people clicking on online ads.
If you're buying stuff from spam, then you're intolerably stupid. There's certainly good money to be made from marketing to the intolerably stupid, but that money isn't supporting anyhing I care about.
Online advertising, on the other hand, often supports web sites that are providing value to you. There are all sorts of reasons for non-stupid people to click on them.
* Clicking provides financial support to a web site (like Slashdot) that you like.
* Because the ads are targeted to a subject you are interested in (because you visited the web site), there's at least a chance you want the product. It may be a wine press advertised on a wine-brewing web site, or a new bit of hardware on Slashdot, but the link is in front of you and it's easier to click on the thing than to go search for it. (Even if you don't click, you've now heard of it, and when you decide to spend some money it'll be one of the things in your mind.)
* More recently, they have ways of advertising geographically. If it's a restaurant you might like or a shoe store, you'd have to find out where it is, and you might as well click through the link. Again, it's faster than a separate search, and better targeted than spam.
Obviously this isn't an immense boon, but it is a small one, and if the ads themselves aren't obnoxious, it doesn't hurt to encourage it. I'd never, ever, ever click on a Flash ad or an animated-gif ad, because I don't want to encourage it. But if a polite text ad helps keep some site up and running, it costs me nothing and profits both the web site and the store.
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