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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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After reading the previous techdirt post linked here, I would guess that this new audit solution would just add another meaningless number to the two you are already generating from you logfiles. I think the solution is just to use one analyzer system, be it an analyzer you run on your weblogs or one the audit company runs on your weblogs and use that to gauge realtive traffic.
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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