How should you measure traffic to your website?
Posted 24 July 2007 at 8:23AM by Simon Dickson in Managing your website
One of the web's most attractive features for marketers is its measurability. Since the very earliest days, web servers have kept logs of files downloaded, users' IP addresses, referring sites, and even the software used by each visitor. More modern methods, based on javascript or 'web bugs', took it to another level. All this gives visibility, and a depth to the data, which no other marketing channel can rival.
But what exactly should you take as your measure? In the old days, it was 'hits' - literally, the total number of files served by the server. Pages, graphics, everything. It soon became obvious that this was open to all kinds of manipulation: put five images on your page, and you could claim six hits each time someone visited the page. Boost your traffic overnight by adding a few more images to each page. This ultimately led to 'page impressions' - counting the pages themselves, not the individual elements - becoming the most favoured metric.
Now, newer web techniques are beginning to call that into question, too. Many sites are making use of an approach known as 'ajax' - which allows for parts of a page to be refreshed without the whole page reloading. This is unquestionably a good development: it makes for a much smoother, faster user experience. But it makes something of a mockery of the 'page impression' concept. If I click to load a page, then click again to reload a particular element within that page, do I score one or two? The former is more easily justifiable, but you can bet most site owners would rather count every individual click as a new 'impression'.
Now, in a press release (PDF) published last week, leading market researchers Nielsen//NetRatings have come out in favour of time-based metrics:
Total Minutes is the best engagement metric in this initial stage of Web 2.0 development, not only because it ensures fair measurement of Web sites using (rich applications) and streaming media, but also of Web environments that have never been well-served by the page view, such as online gaming and Internet applications.
As an example, they note that MySpace beats YouTube 10-to-1 in terms of page views, but only 3-to-1 in terms of total time spent on the site. Intriguingly, this new measurement knocks Google off the number one spot for the first time in recent memory: AOL, Yahoo, MSN and Fox all do better in terms of Total Minutes.
So what's the right thing to do? I've personally reached the conclusion that the only metric which really matters to a business is - guess what? - profitability. All the other web measurements can be useful in terms of tweaking your strategy, your message or your customer service. I'm as addicted to statistics as ever I was, checking my own page impressions several times daily. But no amount of page impressions will, in and of themselves, pay the mortgage.
Tags: ajax, hits, metrics, nielsen netratings, page impressions, traffic analysis
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Comments
2. At July 25, 2007 7:58 AM, Mrs Beena Wankar wrote:
Surely knowing that you have loyal visistors that visit your site on a regular basis is also a very important, if not, more important aspect of web traffic statistic gathering.
3. At July 26, 2007 6:35 PM, Ian Jenkins wrote:
In my view the whole issue of Web stats is becoming blurred; sites that report the stats and therefore the rating of other sites may do so from a vested interest perspective. Further "unique visitors" are less than easy to determine presumably non cached re-visits are returned as unique aren't they? In business for me; while new visitors are obviously important, I want to know how many returners there are which will tell me much more about how well I'm performing in the market place!
4. At August 1, 2007 10:00 AM, Pam wrote:
Personally I never set much store by hit counters, and I would certainly never place one on a homepage as I see people do. That information is for designers and webmasters, it's not especially relevant to visitors.
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1. At July 24, 2007 11:19 AM, Robert Currie wrote: