Today's New York Times addressed an issue that's been getting talked about more and more in recent months: The problems with accurately monitoring site hits.
How many people visited Style.com, the online home of Vogue and W magazines, last month? Was it 421,000, or, more optimistically, 497,000? Or was the real number more than three times higher, perhaps 1.8 million?
The answer — which may be any, or none, of the above — is a critical one for Condé Nast, which owns the site, and for companies like Ralph Lauren, which pay to advertise there. Condé Nast’s internal count (1.8 million) was much higher than the tally by ComScore (421,000) or Nielsen/NetRatings (497,000), whose numbers are used to help set advertising rates, and the discrepancies have created a good deal of friction.
Other big media companies — including Time Warner, The Financial Times and The New York Times — are equally frustrated that their counts of Web visitors keep coming in vastly higher than those of the tracking companies. There are many reasons for the differences (such as how people who use the Web at home and at the office are counted), but the upshot is the same: the growth of online advertising is being stunted, industry executives say, because nobody can get the basic visitor counts straight.
Depending on what side of the aisle you're on -- seller, or consumer (or both) -- you may have differing opinions as to just how tragic this situation is. After all, with more flashing, popping, and noisy banner ads than ever, it sure doesn't seem like online advertising has stalled in any way.
But in an era where more historically dependable economic factors such as consumer confidence, automobile sales, and interest rates are erratic and unpredictable, the business world has come to depend a great deal on online commerce. Which means that any sudden fluctuation or uncertainty regarding eCommerce could indeed have grim repercussions.
Online advertising is expected to generate more than $20 billion in revenue this year, more than double the $9.6 billion it represented as recently as 2004. Nobody doubts that the figure will grow — particularly as advertisers hone their techniques for aiming messages to particular consumers — but the question remains how much the clashing traffic figures will hold the market back.
... Many advertisers pay Web publishers each time their ad gets an impression, meaning that it is viewed by a reader, but each company uses its own methodology to count impressions.
To make matters worst, two agencies that buy huge amounts of ads — Starcom MediaVest Group and the MindShare unit of Group M, part of WPP — threatened major Web sites last spring that they would slow the money flow if the Web publishers did not get working on the discrepancies. Advertisers are concerned not only about how many people visit sites, but also how often their ads appear.
The article goes on to explore just how this situation is different from that of traditional media, where numbers can also contradict each other, and then outlines some of the possible causes for the discrepancies (from customers who regularly delete their cookies, to tracking systems that don't count a site hit if a consumer visits it from a work location, and so on).
Read How Many Site Hits? Depends Who’s Counting at the New York Times here, and let us know what you think in the comments section.
