Audits Rather Than Exit Polls For Site Visitors
from the count-'em-up dept
A few months ago, we pointed to Adam Penenberg's piece pointing out that there didn't seem to be a good way to measure actual web traffic to a particular site. Log files often gave conflicting and incorrect numbers, and the big counting services also gave very different estimates, and ignored small to mid-sized sites altogether. That was especially troublesome as many advertisers really are interested in more targeted niche mid-sized sites, but want to know how much traffic they actually get. Penenberg has now written a followup about one company that takes a different approach: they audit your log files, get rid of all the non-human traffic and fraudulent clicks and count the real visitors as accurately as possible. In other words, while the big counters have a panel from which they survey, this company actually counts the traffic. Considering all the controversy over this year's election process, is it any surprise that a system that's really an audit might be better than one that basically uses "exit polls"?
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You can always run the free analog reporting tool on your logs yourself. Or if you want to pay someone to do it for you, I would guess clicktracks uses much of analog's technology.
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