28 Feb 09 Anomalies in Online Marketing Math
Hitwise data is absolutely fantastic for a whole host of applications, ranging from understanding competitor marketing behaviour, doing keyword research, finding decent affiliates and many other things.
One of those other things is understanding how competitors may be inflating their figures.
For many marketers still marching to the drumbeat of the TV Industrial Complex, “visits” and “reach” are the be all and end all of metrics, when, as I’ve argued before, these metrics are merely proxies for the one metric, Return on Investment. By focusing on this metric, you alleviate any kind of misnomers in calculating proxy metrics like visits.
How can visits be inflated?
Well, it comes down to definitions and representation of data. For all practical purposes, visits are intended to measure people accessing a website. The intent of the marketer measuring this is to understand how many times people came to look at the website. However, this can get confused in situations when people are providing hosted software as a service without rewriting URLs.
For example;
Briscoes in New Zealand host their catalogue on with Ceros Media. When people on the www.briscoes.co.nz website click from http://briscoes.co.nz/catalogue.aspx to http://cde.cerosmedia.com/Briscoes-homeware-specials/1F499d62edbb8b0012.cde, then all of those visits to Briscoes’s catalogue, on the Briscoes website would count as visits to Ceros Media.
Metaphor: If I visit one house and see another house through the window, to which house should the visit count?
Now, for the most part this doesn’t really matter, somebody saw the brand, whether it is on your site or not is largely irrelevant. However, it does matter for reporting purposes because the definition of the metric is entirely counter to its intent – which is to see how many people came to visit your site. From Ceros’ point of view their traffic would consist of everybody who they are hosting catalogue for, when in reality, the only real visitors to www.ceros.com are B2B visitors looking for a flash based interactive magazine solution.
This type of a domain strategy would cause Ceros to inflate their statistics and report a significantly higher visit number, which would allow them to charge more for advertising to any TV Industrial Complex marketer – if they were running an aggregated magazine website. This practice would even stack up when viewing it from third party competitive Intelligence tools like Hitwise.
The other disadvantages to a domain naming strategy like this is that for the customers that do notice the change in URL, they may question and feel uneasy about what is going on. Also, when people link into these pages, the all important “link juice” that Google relies on for relevance ranking, will not flow to your domain.
At the end of the day, it doesn’t matter how many visitors a particular website gets; yours or your advertising supplier - what matters is how many of the right visitors did your message get?
Add New Comment
Viewing 5 Comments
Thanks. Your comment is awaiting approval by a moderator.
Do you already have an account? Log in and claim this comment.
Do you already have an account? Log in and claim this comment.
regards
sears parts
Do you already have an account? Log in and claim this comment.
Do you already have an account? Log in and claim this comment.
Do you already have an account? Log in and claim this comment.
Do you already have an account? Log in and claim this comment.
I was just trying to find a live example of domain naming strategies that inflate visitor statstics, which I'm sure you would agree, that by having client magazines hosted under your domain inflates your real visitor statistics and affects their SEO.
You also say that "the traffic is clearly important - not for statistics in the auditing sense, but for conversions into sales" which reinforces my point that I close with "it doesn’t matter how many visitors a particular website gets; yours or your advertising supplier - what matters is how many of the right visitors did your message get?"
The inflated visitor statistics are only relevant in a sales environment on "an aggregated magazine website".
Add New Comment
Trackbacks