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Web audience counters need overhauling
18/04/07 – Two reports released this week have called for the way that web audiences are recorded to be changed. The studies have warned that changing user behaviour could make counting the web audience using page-views and cookies unreliable.The net measurement firm comScore revealed that cookies that are being used to record user behaviour could be being over-counted.
comScore analysed 400,000 US home PCs and discovered that a minority of web users clear their cookies from their computer on a regular basis.
By clearing their cookies it means that servers have to deposit new cookies the next time they visit a site, which could mean that unique visitors to websites are being over-counted.
Dr Magid Abraham, comScore president, said: "It is clear that a certain segment of internet users clears its cookies very frequently. These 'serial resetters' have the potential to wildly inflate a site's internal unique visitor tally, because just one set of 'eyeballs' at the site may be counted as 10 or more unique visitors over the course of a month."
The study showed that 7% of computers accounted for 35% of cookies and if applied to the rest of the internet comScore estimate that website audiences could be being exaggerated by 150%.
Another separate study by Nielsen/NetRatings has called into question the relevance of looking at page-views as barometer of user behaviour.
It argues that this method of studying web audiences has been rendered obsolete by the increase of audio visual content on the web and the development of new technology.
This is because page-view metrics are slanted against sites with audio and visual elements and as a result could provide inaccurate results.
Analyst Alex Burmaster advised the best way of measuring a site's audience would be to record the time spent on a website.
"Time spent is probably the best single indicator of user engagement although it can be a misleading metric for search and comparison sites that aim to help users find what they're looking for as quickly and efficiently as possible," he said.
The most popular sites in the UK when measured by page-views are Google and Facebook but by measuring time spent on a site eBay and the online game RuneScape come out on top.
During February Nielsen revealed that Britons spent almost 28 million hours on eBay and visitors to RuneScape spent on average 6 hours and 32 minutes on the site per visit.
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Published Date: 2007-04-18 14:14:31Subscribe to our RSS News feed:
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