Internet Advertising Hits A Roadblock
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The internet advertising world has turned into a multi-billion dollar per year business. With more avenues for advertisers than ever before, this trend seems to be going nowhere but up. But one problem may halt the ever-increasing industry - Hits!
Without a universal way to measure a websites value an advertiser really has no way to determine how much they will spend to show their ads on a site. Industry experts such as ComScore and Nielsen have made a great deal by offering up their ESTIMATES on a sites traffic. Both services vary heavily on their estimates though.
One example in this hotly debated topic is Style.Com. Style’s internal stat counters showed a total of 1.8 million visits in August while ComScore and Nielsen showed dramatically lower ratings. ComScore estimated traffic to be 421,000 hits while Nielsen was a little more optimistic with 497,000 hits estimated.
Will industry growth continue at this rapid pace without a rock solid statistic to base it on? I’m sure it will continue to grow, but I think the pace might slow down until we can reach some sort of universal count on how many hits a site actually generates. Alexa, Technorati, and the above mentioned stat services might be a good indication of a sites popularity, but it is by no means an exact science. What will it take to get one global method of counting statistics?
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[...] Yaro has a firm, current example of comScore numbers being half of actual. Tags: Advertising, Blogging, Brian Sugar, comScore, PopSugar, San Francisco Chronicle, [...]
The problem, I think, mainly lies with not reporting international traffic as actual traffic by services like ComScore, Neilsen etc…They seem to only think that U.S traffic is a measure of success for a website.
I don’t rely on those statistics at all, and neither should anyone who knows any better.
The internet is a global marketplace, if services that track traffic cannot realize that - then they should not be tracking anything.
Wow, such a big difference in numbers between style.com and the others. The former’s numbers are about 4 times greater. So what’s a reliable stats tool use?
We always thought it a bit curious how you will see greatly varying visitor stats for the same website from the various reporting agencies. It is a reminder that when it comes to statistics, numbers can be manipulated to show whatever outcome is wanted.
We agree that until such time that there is a universally recognized stat counter that is fairly accurate, there is always going to be an issue/debate about true traffic numbers.
Why do people still call it hits? I bet that style site is still counting ‘hits’ not visits…
Well, I’m not sure the lack of a solid measuring stick is going to slow industry growth.
Most internet savvy businesses I’ve come in contact with just chance buying an ad for a month or six months and then track how well it converts for them. If it does well, they renew. If not, they look for another advertising opportunity.
Actually, the internet allows much better conversion tracking than television or magazines, so I can only see continued growth for this medium.
“Alexa, Technorati, and the above mentioned stat services might be a good indication of a sites popularity, but it is by no means an exact science.”
surely it’s not exact science but it’s could be sometimes. As like your Blueprint Yaro. That’s should be an science some times.That’s blueprint is working very well for me, even I’m not finish yet
All those measures are a bit of a lucky dip if you ask me. Where Google Analytics chooses to report that the site got so many actual visitors, Awstats says something else.
I’m not familiar with Nielsen or ComScore, but i do know that Alexa’s ranking is also irregular as it only counts hist from sites that have the Alexa software installed.
So really, any of these “stats” producing softwares only seem to serve their own interest first.
Monika
Reality is there are dozens of companies working on just this fact - they know that the key to capturing ever-growing online advertising dollars is 1) Ability to target, 2) Ability to show results 3) A way to demonstrate conversion
Jeff
In my opinion, I seriously doubt it if there’ll be one big system for evaluating a website. It’s almost impossible. However, people can perhaps make a service which counts a blog’s Technorati, Yahoo! Backlinks, Alexa, Google Backlinks and RSS subscribers to gauge the popularity of the blog…
Yaro:
I got so fed up with statistics (or lack of any REAL statistics) I looked for a way to find my own. Once I started doing research, I found that looking at traffic alone just wouldn’t provide any valid information. (I’ve given up on “hits”) I started finding ways to track advertising all the way to the point of sale. Waht good is a bunch of traffic if it doesn’t produce sales? If I can track traffic to the purchase…now there’s a useable number!
Of course this doesn’t work if you want traffic for traffic’s sake, or if you monetize with Adsense or something related. But tracking to the sale sure makes a difference in sales or affiliate sites!
Russell