Web Site Visitors: How Many?

Trend: Web traffic continues to grow while current methods of measuring that traffic become less accurate.

BusinessWeek.com describes competing methods of measuring traffic online that leave advertisers, investors, and even Net companies almost flying blind. New technologies Ajax and RSS are clouding the already muddy picture. Excerpts below.

Link: Web Numbers: What's Real?.

The dirty little secret of Silicon Valley is that no one knows exactly who is going where on the Web. That flies in the face of the impression that online advertising is the most dependably trackable ad medium of all time, a big reason spending on Web ads is expected to grow 33% this year, to $16 billion. But confusion over traffic measurement could cast a chill over the Web 2.0 craze. Valuations for startups such as Facebook Inc. and YouTube Inc. appear to be doubling every few months, but those numbers are based on traffic figures that could be misleading.

From the start, measuring online traffic was a juggling act. Rather than simply relying on a Web site's traffic reports, advertisers traditionally compared that data with information from Nielsen//NetRatings Inc. (NTRT ) and comScore, independent services that recruit Web surfers to record their mouse clicks. Those outfits argue that there are many reasons not to just count the clicks off a Web site's server logs. For instance, comScore points out that servers would count pop-up ads as a page view if the tracking service didn't filter them out.

Independent traffic analysis becomes more important as bigger chunks of advertising flow online and the threat of "click fraud," which inflates ad bills, grows bigger. No wonder that a host of newer services, such as Alexa and Hitwise, are highlighting the weaknesses of the older traffic-measuring companies and are muscling onto the scene with alternatives. By providing some free traffic data via their Web sites, these outfits make it easier for anyone to publish an estimate. But they also have their own blind spots and are making side-by-side comparisons vastly more confusing.

To see why there's an opening for new ways of measuring traffic, look at what has happened to the old standard for gauging online growth, the page view. As the Internet evolved during the 1990s, advertisers came to rely on the number of pages a site served up each month as their most reliable metric. With the rise of new programming and distribution technologies, however, page views suddenly look less relevant. For instance, the beauty of a site such as Meebo is that it is built with software tools called Ajax, which speed up Web surfing. When you log onto Meebo, instead of loading a new page for every mouse click, only the log-in section is loaded. But no matter how long people stay on Meebo, they're technically viewing only one page.

Ajax isn't the only technology that's upending traditional Web measurement. Real Simple Syndication, or RSS, lets people sign up to have news articles, blog posts, or audio interviews from their favorite sites sent directly to their computers. But since they aren't surfing around, none of the sites gets credit for the page view.

For advertisers, the problem is that while any one method of measurement may capture certain Web technologies or demographics, it misses others. An alternative to counting page views, for instance, is to measure reach, which is a calculation of each site's usage as a percentage of all Net traffic.

The best hope for clarity is for Web ad giants and small fry alike to work with the established measurement services to improve their tracking ability. ComScore and Nielsen//NetRatings are beginning to respond. ComScore, for instance, now reports the number of requested videos at online video sites, rather than page views or unique visitors.

Some observers expect that in time a variety of metrics, such as time spent online, will be applied to different services until one measurement that combines a set of factors can emerge. Until that happens, though, the Internet will have to deal with the discrepancies. And Web metrics, like company valuations, will remain a crapshoot.

Comments

[what are the]

The factors that are determinant in a website’s http://www.alexa.com/data/details/main?url=www.fortunehotels.in Alexa rankings apart from the data collected from the users of the Alexa toolbar are no where clearly mentioned. This somehow brings in a question of doubt and credibility issues as far as the Alexa rankings are concerned. However, even today the Alexa toolbar has the largest chunk in determining the ranking of a website.