Aaron Gerdes

An article in BusinessWeek titled “Web Numbers: What’s Real?” (Found via Emergence Marketing) describes the difficulties of measuring website traffic. And there are many.

Anyone who’s tried to decipher the stats for a website, even when presented via a reasonable visual model, know that there’s lots of confusion. Often lay-people use the word “hits” to describe a visit to the site: in fact a hit occurs each time a file is downloaded as a user views an entire page (your page has several files, including the page itself and images). “Page views” is the technical term for the grouping of files that makes up a page — but then hopefully your users look at more than one page.. how do we determine that?

There are methods and tools to determine the above, but beyond that, it gets messy. The problem becomes huge when you have a website that uses heavy Flash content, or deliver content via an RSS feed, or AJAX (similar to what Gmail uses, where the page doesn’t always reload when there is a “state change”).

The article shows the impact of these shortcomings on Silicon Valley:

The dirty little secret of Silicon Valley is that no one knows exactly who is going where on the Web. That flies in the face of the impression that online advertising is the most dependably trackable ad medium of all time, a big reason spending on Web ads is expected to grow 33% this year, to $16 billion. But confusion over traffic measurement could cast a chill over the Web 2.0 craze. Valuations for startups such as Facebook Inc. and YouTube Inc. appear to be doubling every few months, but those numbers are based on traffic figures that could be misleading.

That’s an excellent point, but it matters for small businesses too: working on a more limited budget mandates you keep the performance of your website (and other marketing) accountable.

What tools work, and how can you interpret their data? I’m working on an intro to managing your website metrics and getting valuable information to improve bottom-line results. Stay tuned.