If I want to advertise on a website how do I make sense of the stats that are given to indicate the website's traffic?
/ 01 December 2009 - 02:17 pm
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1 Comment
Ad sales people tend to dazzle us with stats about 'page impressions', 'hits', 'unique visitors', etc and often seem unwilling (or unable) to explain exactly what the stats mean. If someone tells me that my ad will last for "1000 impressions" what does that mean? Can you put it into Plain English for us so we can make better decisions about where to advertise - and whether we're getting good value for money.
Comments
Hi Jooles
I am so glad you asked this question, because it drives me nuts when I see people being duped by veiled presentation of website visitors.
The most misunderstood concept is a "hit" commonly misrepresented by ad sales people as a "person". A hit, as described by Google Analytics glossary is "a request to the web server for a file. This can be an HTML page, an image (jpeg, gif, png, etc.), a sound clip, a cgi script, and many other file types. An HTML page can account for several hits: the page itself, each image on the page, and any embedded sound or video clips. Therefore, the number of hits a website receives is not a valid popularity gauge, but rather is an indication of server use and loading."
In other words (i.e.Plain English), if one person downloads one web page that contains four photographs and a logo, that might be five hits. So not five people.
A while back in a 'back to basics' web seminar I gave, I provided the following very simple definitions for the key terms:
Page view
One single ‘viewing’ of a page.
Impression
One single 'viewing' of an ad on a web page.
Visitor session
All activity for one visitor to a website until they go to another website or close their browser.
Unique visitor
One single person who visits a website during a specified time period (e.g. unique visitors per month).
Clickthrough
The number of clicks on a link to your site.
Hit
An ‘action’ on a website, such as the download of a logo.
'Unique visits' is tricky. Your website might have 20,000 visitors a month, but only 12,000 of them are unique visitors, i.e. distinct individuals. The rest are repeat visitors.
In answer to your specific question, if you are told your ad will last for 1,000 impressions, it means until the ad has been displayed on the web page 1,000 times in users' browser windows. That does not necessarily mean 1,000 distinct individuals have seen it, unless they promise you "unique impressions". if you pay by "clickthrough" it means you only pay when someone actually clicks on the ad to go to your site.
If someone boasts to you that their website receives "5,000 hits a week" throw it back at them with "yes, but that's irrelevant to me; how many monthly unique visitors does it receive?"
Vicki Allpress Hill Connecting audiences to the arts va@vickiallpress.com