Belden: Sites have fewer visitors, but more loyal readers
Belden Associates is about to release a new report saying that commonly accepted unique visitor counts based on logfile analysis and cookie-tracking are wrong.
Basically, Belden found that major traffic-monitoring software underlying all current tools are unreliable because they rely on cookies and because of multiple computer use by readers.
Cookie-clearing is the major new finding: Preliminary data shows "average daily users" of news sites clear cookies an average of once per week -- and as a result, are being counted not once, but four times.
Belden also found that nearly half of all computers have more than one user, and more than half of all users of newspaper Web sites use two or more computers to access the sites.
"In general this has left sites with a dramatic misunderstanding of the value of their audience by leading sites to believe that they had a very large audience (usually a multiple of circulation) that is extremely infrequent and predominantly from out of the market," analyst Greg Harmon says.
In fact, sites have far fewer visitors than reported, but those visitors access sites far more frequently than reported, Belden concludes.
This is great news for sites, particularly local sites. Not only does it mean that online news audiences tend to be much more loyal than previously believed, but sites should be able to get higher rates from local advertisers.
Apr 22, 2004 | E-MAIL | SAVE | PRINT | PERMALINK | DISCUSS(0)
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