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compete.com is showing less than 1/3 of the unique US visitors that Google Analytics is reporting for me. Compete seems better than Alexa for comparing relative traffic across multiple sites, but they seem pretty worthless as far as reporting actual visitor numbers.
I'll have to look closer at the "unique" traffic comparisons between GA and Compete for my site.Quote:
Originally Posted by Westech
Unlike Alexa, Compete might simply be reporting the actual traffic it sees rather than trying to extrapolate "real" traffic numbers. If this is true then it would only be useful for comparing one site against another, but not for getting actual traffic levels of a specific site.
For me what I really care about with my own traffic is pageviews and visits per day and total pageviews per visit. I don't really care about total unique visitors per month because I see this as a totally fictitious number regardless of methodology (nobody has given me a definition of "uniques" yet).
What I'm refering to as "uniques" here is monthly unique visitors -- how many unique people have visited the site within a one month period. The same person visiting the site multiple times during the one month period is only counted once. Of course, even with this specific definition the numbers will vary somewhat depending on how unique visitors are tracked (cookies or IP's... javascript or images...etc.)Quote:
Originally Posted by KLB
Absolute monthly uniques is the main metric that most big ad buyers want to know when evaluating direct ad buys. Their main concern seems to be how many unique eyeballs will be seeing their ad.
Great, but how do you determine this? No method can truly track this. People share computers, IP addresses, browser profiles, etc. People also use different computers, connect from different locations, use different browsers, etc. Cookies get deleted, IP addresses change, etc. Quite simply the concept of "unique" visitors per month is a fraud. At best you can determine unique visitor's per day.Quote:
Originally Posted by Westech
For example if a teacher uses a site like mine in her class, she might teach the same subject to three or four classes. These students would share classroom computers thus multiple "uniques" would actually be sharing IP address and cookies. If a user connects via dialup, each time they could get a different IP address or share the same address with thousands of other users (e.g. AOL). Thus you can't rely on IP address to determine uniques. Many users could use the same computers in an Internet cafe or library and thus share the same cookies.
How do you deal with bots and spiders that spoof regular browsers? More and more of these bots are part of zombie networks that infect regular computers and thus scrape pages from multiple "regular" IP addresses, thus non-human visitors are becoming nearly impossible to separate from human visitors.
Daily uniques aren't immune to those same issues. The same percentage of a whole should be affected and thuse the same margin of error.Quote:
Great, but how do you determine this? No method can truly track this. People share computers, IP addresses, browser profiles, etc. People also use different computers, connect from different locations, use different browsers, etc. Cookies get deleted, IP addresses change, etc. Quite simply the concept of "unique" visitors per month is a fraud. At best you can determine unique visitor's per day.
You are correct that daily uniques are not immune, but they would be less susceptible to causes like different users using the same computers or different computers sharing the same IP address. There would also be less skew caused by the factors describe above. Notice the key word "less".Quote:
Originally Posted by Chris
They say there are three types of lies: lies, damn lies and statistics. I'd say there is a fourth lie, "uniques". :p