123,000 people, 1,989,229 page impressions, each month
Learning a new language allows you to understand more about the world. In this respect the web community is just like any other; with it’s own culture, norms and language. If you know the language you have a much greater understanding how the community works and better access to the benefits that engagement provides for you and your company.
It was with this in mind I wonder how many people still don’t know what site visitors and page impressions actually mean.
Take today’s Western Mail which includes several large ads for their JobsWales site, promoting the fact (audited by ABC Electronic, so it must be right) that 123,000 people log onto their site and produce 1,989,229 page impressions each month.
Personally I think these very impressive figures are correct and reflect the way Wales’ 2m web users now access information; although they may also be misleading depending on how they are produced.
Let’s start with ‘people’ or ‘unique users’ as some sites call them - be careful these are different entities.
Did you know that many sites still count a visit from an automated ‘bot’ as a site visitor (person). Bots are used by Google, and around 60,000 other search engines, to produce their index of the web. Without then you would not appear in their search list, so they provide a very valuable service. As the web changes each second these bots have to revisit sites many times each month if they are keep up to date (as a site owner you can set the frequency of visit to be higher or lower). Why is this important? If you look closely at any servers’ web logs (the record of who actually visited and when), you see ‘bots’ make up between 50% and 90% of site visitors. As these bots trawl the site to index content, they can also make up a large percentage of the ‘page impressions’ (the number of times a ‘page’ is viewed).
Official Site Auditors (and here ABC Electronic are the most widely used) record Unique Users as someone with “a unique and valid identifier” and distinguish ‘actual people’ from ‘bots’ through the use of either: (i) IP+User-Agent, (ii) Cookie, and/or (iii) Registration ID.” (Cookies and Registration ID are the most accutrate as they are harder to automate, although not impossible -see Captcha Code for more details, if you’re interested).
I have no intention of discouraging companies from advertising online - I’d be a fool to do this as this is my business - and for the reasons stated above I am inclinced to believe the JobWales website gets 123,000 real people visiting each month and viewing on average 16.2 pages each. All I’m suggesting is that when you come to advertise online, that you measure results by the number of genuine and useful enquires you get and not by some reported readership, visitor number or impression stats that have limited commercial value.
Tags: page impressions, ROI, unique visitors, web reporting, web stats