Your Web Traffic Doesn’t Mean a Thing to Advertisers

Just did a webinar this morning with Media Life and BPA on the challenges of web traffic measurement from an advertiser perspective. Key points:

• Total traffic to a web site can be impacted three different ways: unique visitors per month, visits per unique per month, and page views per visit.
• Most important metrics to an advertiser: page views per month, page views per visit, uniques per month, visits per month.
• A site with high page views per visit isn’t necessarily a good thing.
• I expose seven games publishers can play with metrics to look bigger to advertisers.
• The positives/negatives of the three ways publishers get demographics about their web visitors.
• The inaccuracies of ComScore/Neilsen NetRatings/@Plan and Compete/Quantcast/Alexa … and what role they should play in buying decisions.
• What web audit companies can and can’t do to help evaluate a site.

But the pièce de résistance was the last slide where I told the audience that in the end, total traffic to a web site doesn’t matter to an advertiser making a buying decision … or at least it shouldn’t matter. You’ll have to look through the slides attached below to find out why. Or better yet, click on over and listen to the full 45-minute webinar.