Comments on: Traffic Stats are Dead

By: Martin

Martin — Thu, 21 Dec 2006 07:48:51 +0000

As usual, Scrivs has a good take on this issue.

By: Dennis McDonald

Dennis McDonald — Wed, 20 Dec 2006 22:06:54 +0000

I agree with all the analytical and measurement problems associated with current metrics — I used to crunch nunbers for a living — but I am less concerned about these issues since I don’t sell advertising.

Plus, having been tracking Google Analytics for over a year, I’ve noticed a pretty high correlation between page views and unique visits (I don’t have multipage documents).

I’m basically interested in connecting with people via my blog. So I care about relative page views (which is why I publish a “top ten” list every week) plus I care about how people navigate (which has led me to modify the layout and contents of my inital page and the links available from all pages).

So I guess when I wear my statistics hat I am ready to criticize current metrics (http://www.ddmcd.com/rattle.html) but, in the scheme of things, I don’t really care that much.

By: Shaun Dewberry

Shaun Dewberry — Wed, 20 Dec 2006 20:53:21 +0000

I think Google has the right idea (once again). Their “Site overlay” feature on Google Analytics allows you to measure mouse clicks mapped to certain areas of a page. Presumably this is through some javascript/ajax wizardy. It’s bound to be more effective than page views in the AJAX/dynamic page age. It’s still far from perfect, but if some standard can be built around measuring this metric I think it’s the most reliable current measurement of site activity.

RSS is a fair bit trickier, but the final solution (if there is one) could require a combination of RSS subscription hits with the above “page click” count. This still leaves the problem of duplicate visits which need to be filtered based on, I don’t know, maybe sessions or something (thinking of users behind a proxy here). A session id on the RSS feed could help.

Hmmm, can’t solve the net’s problems yet – lemme grab another beer and think about it.

By: stii.za.net » Blog Archive » Traffic stats and web advertising

stii.za.net » Blog Archive » Traffic stats and web advertising — Wed, 20 Dec 2006 13:58:28 +0000

[...] I’ve seen quite a bit lately on web advertising. Mike wrote an interesting article “Traffic stats are dead” [...]

By: Mike

Mike — Wed, 20 Dec 2006 13:44:49 +0000

Thanks for the comments Tyler – comments box will magically expand in size in the next few days

By: Tyler

Tyler — Wed, 20 Dec 2006 13:34:25 +0000

I think a sites worth can be measured in a few areas, depending on the type of site. 1. Blog The amount of quality posts matched with users comments on those posts. Eg. Techcrunch 2. Social Sites The user base and the frequent activity of those users. I mean its useless having 100 000 users registered on your site if only 100 of them actually contribute. Eg. Flickr & digg 3. Search Engines Well this is an easy one, on the amount of queries handled and the variation of those queries, unless it is a niche search engine. Eg. ThatShoe by Incubeta. P.S. Mike please make this comment box bigger. :)