How’s Your Traffic?

Methods, Means and More towards effective Web Ad Measurement…

Your site and ads are featured in the baffling and mysterious world of cybermaze! You've had your Web page up for six months now, maybe even a year, but do you know how it is doing? Probably not! As a marketer, you would be eager to know how many people clicked on your banner or ad, wouldn’t you? The number of hits? Visits? Impressions? What are you doing to track the results of your web site's performance? You would have added a feedback button at the bottom of the Homepage, but that does not go too far. What do you do?

Welcome to Web Ad Measurement!

Why is it important?

Because it can provide you with useful information, such as how many people visited your Web site last month, what site they came from, how long they stayed, what they looked at, etc. For instance, sixty-three people visited Yahoo four times last week to search for business- related information.

Afraid of enduring a rather technical explanation, you ask ”Why are Web traffic statistics important?” The answer: They make you a much more savvy marketer by telling you:

• Which Web pages are most popular, which are least used?
• Who is visiting your Web site?
• Which Web browsers optimise your Web pages?
• Which Web search engines are most useful to you, and which are the least useful?
• Which banner ads are bringing the most visitors?
• Where errors or bad links may be occurring in your Web pages?

Having discussed its utility, what are the methods by which one can measure web ad effectiveness?

The most commonly used method is “Measurement by Hit” method. What’s a hit? Each time a server presents an advertiser’s file, it is counted as one page viewed by the surfer. Many sites report traffic on the basis of number of hits per day.

The other method is “Pageview” or “Impression” method. The effectiveness of the ad is measured in terms of how many individuals viewed an entire Web page.

The Hitch

The Net has its own pitfalls too. For instance, how can one ascertain whether or not as many individuals, as the site claims, do see the banner? That’s one of the major problems apart from the difficulty in measuring the undivided duration of the visit or the amount of interest generated to catch the visitor’s attention.

Analysing Traffic on your site

There are three ways to analyse Web site traffic:

• Install a counter on your Web page
• Purchase Web traffic analysis software
• Employ an outside firm to audit your Web traffic

1. Installing a counter. A counter is a tweak at the end of the page proclaiming, “You are the 100th visitor to visit this site”. A counter often scares surfers away. There are ways to put the counter where only you can see it, not the world at large. There are other alternatives also to count visitors.

2. Purchasing Web traffic analysis software. Want a detailed analysis of Web traffic right on your desktop? Then you are the potential customer for installing web traffic analysis software! To perform an analysis, you download the access logs from your ISP's computer via FTP to your own hard disk. (Ask your ISP in what directory your log files can be found.) The analysis software will typically "parse" or interpret the raw log file line by line, and place the various elements into separate fields in a relational database.

Here are a few products that can help you analyse your traffic:

• Market Focus 2 (standard edition) from Intersé,
• Net Analysis Desktop 1.1a from net. Genesis
• WebTrends 2.1 from egSoftware,

In short, traffic analysis allows you to ask questions, which help you to fine-tune your web marketing strategy. Web marketing without statistical analysis is like learning to drive blindfolded.

3. Employ an outside agency to audit your web traffic.

Conclusion

Web ad measurement is not child’s play, but at the same time using the right tools and toys can make it as easy as playing ‘hide and seek’. Consumers seek and marketers hide behind the screens, to observe what they click and when, using it to their advantage! That’s web ad measurement in a nutshell. Happy Tracking!

Further Reading:

1.“Making Internet Advertising Work”
Aronson, Brad
ADV Magazine, March 1999,

2. Everything You Wanted to Know about the Net, But were Afraid to Ask”
The Brief: An Exclusive

3. “Analysing your Web Site Traffic”
Dr Ralph F. Wilson Web Marketing Today, Issue 24, Vol 4