Website Metrics Questions

Chuck Zimmerman

As the audience for AgWired has grown so has the need for us to keep close tabs on how we measure it. You’ve started seeing more advertising and sponsored event coverage and those companies and organizations want to know what they’re getting for their investment. One of my online mentors pointed me to a pretty well-written AP story on this subject. It deals mostly with the issue of whether “page views” is still a reliable metric to evaluate your online advertising expense. I think the case is being made that it isn’t but the problem is what to replace it with.

Hopefully you know that “hits” is really not a useful number when looking at the actual traffic to a website although I keep seeing companies brag about it. I just don’t even report it although it is the biggest number we can measure. If you wonder why feel free to call me and I’ll explain. Here’s an excerpt from the story that provides one of the reasons why page views is now becoming an unreliable metric too.

Other technologies that could deflate page views include Really Simple Syndication, or RSS, which pulls a news site or blog’s new entries, allowing a visitor to bypass a site’s home page and ads for the item of interest. Likewise, someone can watch a three-minute video clip without needing to retrieve a new page.

In such cases, visitors may view fewer pages, but they are more engaged and thus more likely to pay attention to any advertising, said Steve Rubel, senior vice president with the public-relations firm Edelman Worldwide.

Another reason has to do with websites using Ajax, something I can also help you understand if you’re interested.

Besides all this I’ve been finding that no two website statistics packages seem to come up with the same number for the same categories of measurement. For example, we’ve been using Awstats here on all our websites and I’ve been evaluating Google Analytics and most recently a new one called Mint. All three come up with different traffic numbers. I wish I was tech savvy enough to know why. This doesn’t help in the confidence department. Without a standard I have to wonder if we’re comparing apples to apples sometimes when evaluating different websites.

I know how important measurements and numbers are when it comes to justifying an investment. However, as we continue to see the development of standards and software to accomplish this online I would urge companies to also looks at customer feedback and take the time to properly develop a new channel of communication. Sometimes having a smaller group of very engaged customers or members is more important than a larger number who don’t spend much time with the information you’re trying to convey.

Advertising, Internet