businessweek.com — The practice of using consumer panels to estimate Web-site traffic is coming under increased scrutiny and fueling calls for industrywide standards... At first, Digg Chief Executive Jay Adelson thought he just couldn't count. By Digg's estimate, 15 million individuals were visiting the news bookmarking site each month. But advertisers said...
Apr 30, 2007 View in Crawl 4
datalifeApr 30, 2007
I never click on the ads
catcubedApr 30, 2007
Actually, I think this is a good thing. If they spend the time to do a metanalysis comparison between the panel scores and the server logs they could probably find out where and how they are off in the statistics. That way they could compensate going forward or at least better know which measurements are inaccurate.
snowconeApr 30, 2007
I track my web traffic using more than one method and the difference between the results is astounding. The reason advertisers point to things like Alexa is that it's an information game. If you use Alexa, both parties have the figures, but if you use server logs, only the site/publisher has the true numbers and they can be skewed before being given to the advertiser. It's in the site's best interest to be honest, but when confronted with the possibility of "fudging" a little bit for an extra bit of money anything is possible....
Closed AccountApr 30, 2007
one can only dream of a day when internet advertising goes byebye. and really, who cares about impressions and page views. it's all about the clicks.
barnaclebarnesApr 30, 2007
That depends on exactly how you are measuring the sites. Combining page tagging, server logs and panels should give the best idea of a web sites traffic. The key here is a trade off between 'whole of market' numbers and accuracy. I work for Nielsen//NetRatings in New Zealand where we use a different method to NetRatings in the US. We use a page tagging system where sites place some javascript code on each page and we aggregate all this data into a product called Market Intelligence. In New Zealand this works fairly well as most of the large NZ publishers are onboard but we also have a lot of smaller sites using our service (it helps them get advertising by having independent stats). Page tagging is generally considered more accurate than server logs as you only record pages that actually load in the users browser. It doesn't count partial page views but it does count cached pages, etc.No system is perfect but with a combination of panel, logs and tagging we should be able to get closer to a point where we can measure the whole market.
yez70Apr 30, 2007
Alexa could never be accurate - they don't support Firefox. With 15% of the net's users now surfing with Firefox they aren't counting a significant part of the population. Tech sites would have far more firefox users.I recall a Digg story where Digg users were 65% firefox....
alkeysFeb 17, 2010
A valid point brian1625. Digg is full of useful information, hence if your search query was answered from the information available. It's less likey that visitors will click on ads.