Web Visitors, Count Off: 1, 2, 3… If only it were that easy

A recent release by comScore, a leading company in web analytics, states that frequent cookie deletion by Internet users can over project audience size by as much as 150%.

A 2006 study found that 3 out of 10 US Internet users frequently deleted cookies on their computer. Because cookies track things like repeat visits and time on site, they provide a barometer for webmasters, giving a glimpse at how hot or not a page, post, or section of a web site may be. By deleting the cookie and thus the record of a previous visit, the reporting tools begin again at collecting data. So your 2 recent visits now display you as 2 unique individuals… multiply that by hundreds or thousands of visitors and you can see how a measurement like unique visitors can balloon out of control.

This study and other recent commentary on the death of the page view combined with new content delivery tools like RSS, a MySpace page, a widget, a custom toolbar, and others make it an uphill battle to grasp true measures of visits and activity.

I’m curious how you are defining your own measures of popularity. Site owners with popular RSS feeds – do you combine feed stats with page views to try and create a single sense of overall audience? Do you consider a feed subscriber very different from an actual web site visitor? Should you? Send in your comments on how you measure up.

Comments

[Rob Johnston]

My experience has been that regardless of what measure you use (hits, page views, etc.) the only way to capture useful information is to record it consistently and watch the trends over time. With consistency across time you can compare this month to the same month a year, or two years ago. Create a spreadsheet and capture the results every week. Then you can summarize as needed.