Figuring out how many visitors you site has is not only problematic for me. Jan van de Bergh of the online advertising company I-merge recalls an experience with a website that overestimated the number of visitors about ten times, at least that is his estimation.
Digital ad spending can only really start here in China when all online media who want to attract advertisers were audited by independent third-party firms. A recent survey in the US "asked online planners and buyers in North America about key issues in digital marketing. More reliable metrics came out as the top concern." Read the complete article here. Want More Ads? Get Better Metrics.It is of course a tradition that started in the non-digital media, where print publications keep their real circulation also secret.
O yes, I lost the code of Google Analytics again when I changed the lay-out of this weblog. I decided to kick it off, since the huge differences in patterns with Awstats made me only confused. I will later look into Jan's link about Better Metrics.
2 comments:
The best way to check the visitors of a site, is to ask them to put Google Analytics code on it for a couple of days. If they do not want to do it, I don't do business with them.
It does not mean that Google Analytics is the best web stat tool, but it's quite conservative and you can compare the result to other sites with Google Analytics on it. I don't use other Chinese web stat tools, they deliver results that are up to 60% higher than what Google gives. Not sure who is right of course, but it's always better to be on the conservative side.
There are a few problems I have with Google Analytics. It seems to count only the traffic that comes through your front door. From Awstats I see that - although they can count visitors double or even triple - that most of my visitors get to my site through links or search engines, and Google Analytics seems to miss that. And then there is the matter of RSS-feeds: that is no issue for ads, but it would be for traffic. None of the current counting methods can measure those.
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