Six Ways Web Publishers Make Their Site Look Bigger Than It Is

I’ve seen a lot of tricks of the trade publishers will use to make their web site look bigger to the market than it actually is and how many people visit their site. Sometimes the claims may truly be out of ignorance of how the web really works, but more often than not, it’s a very crafty publisher trying to impress a marketer on how big they are and what a market leader they are. Here are some of my favorites:

1. Reporting how many hits they get

I can’t believe that some sites still try to tell advertisers how many hits their web site gets a month, but it happens every day. A hit is simply an object being pulled from your web server. Every graphic, every HTML component, every javascript file, even the style sheet — every one of them is a hit. A single view of a single web page can have 20-30 hits. You had a million hits to your site last month? Hope all 400 visitors enjoyed them. (400 visitors x 2 visits per month x 5 pages per visit, x 25 hits per page)

2. Reporting impressions per month

This isn’t necessarily a bad metric since views of an ad (impression) is often the base currency of web advertising. But it’s terrible for evaluating how big a site is. Let’s say I have a 200,000 page view per month web site with a 728×90 leaderboard at the top and a 160×600 skyscraper on the side. That would be 400,000 impressions per month. But this month I decide to add two badge ads to the bottom of the page. Voila! All of a sudden I have 800,000 impressions per month and my traffic didn’t increase a bit although my share-of-voice for each advertiser just decreased … a topic for another post someday.

3. Not filtering spiders and the publishers own visits

I’ve been through many web site acquisitions and I never take a web site owner’s claims of traffic at face value. They’re not trying to deceive anyone, but often web publishers use metric systems that don’t filter out spiders (also called automated agents or bots) from their metrics. Search engines and other web tools go out and check web sites now and then. This is non-human traffic, can account for 50% or more of a web sites traffic, and should not be reported as real traffic. Check out the IAB’s official list of spiders and bots. Publishers should also filter out traffic from themselves. I know that I’m paranoid and always looking around our web sites, so I myself would probably boost Penton’s web traffic by 10% if it wasn’t filtered out.

4. Reporting registered users

It’s impressive to see all those millions of registered users to a web site. But how many of them have been active on the site over the past month? How about the past year? Marketers beware … unlike controlled circulation magazines that must requalify their circulation periodically, most publishers never requalify registered users. Somebody may have registered for the site back in 1996 and gone off to live in seclusion on a remote tropical island, but by golly, they’re still going to count it as a registered user!

5. Reporting user visits per month

This is another favorite tactic of web publishers. Rather than report unique monthly visitors, they like to report user visits (also called user sessions) per month. Why? Because typically unique people come back 2-3 times per month (and a lot more often on some sites like forums and blogs) so reporting user visits makes me look like I’m reaching 2-3x more people than I really am. I just noticed this in the most recent issue of BtoB Magazine’s Media Power 50 where they reported ThomasNet and Globalspec using while reporting everyone else using unique visitors. Made them look a lot bigger than they really are. Even Globalspec’s own I/PRO audit reports only monthly visits, not unique visitors. Remember that visits is a totally valid metric, but be aware of the very significant difference between visits and unique visitors.

6. Add up daily unique visitors instead of using monthly uniques

This is probably my favorite and the most subtle way that a web publisher can boost their stats. Many metrics applications report monthly unique visitors and daily unique visitors. A daily unique visitor is exactly that; a unique visitor for that specific day only. Come back tomorrow, however, and you are counted as another unique visitor but for a different day. Some publishers add up all their daily uniques and report it as unique visitors for the month. The problem is that this doesn’t de-duplicate visitors who came back on different days. What you need to specify is monthly unique visitors and make sure that they don’t add up their daily uniques. The difference can be as much as 15-20%.

Up next, I think I’ll talk about when a unique visitor really isn’t a unique visitor and when a page view isn’t really a page view…