Web Stats Are Broken

Matt Marshall at Siliconbeat wrote that web analytics are broken and are back to square one, talking about third party web traffic measurement.

The only reason the system isn’t breaking down, and advertisers aren’t pulling out, is because they have no choice but to play. They are taking informed guesses, based on the shoddy statistics available. And Google et al. are using every strategy they can find to deal with this problem.

Webanalyticsbook added some graphs and a good summary of the main companies that guess traffic.

Alexa: Alexa data is collected via the Alexa browser toolbar, which is obviously more often installed on tech interested users, than on average Joe’s computer. This means that more tech relevant users on your site increase the chance that your Alexa rank increases. Also software programmes like Alexabooster can easily “boost” your rank . Alexa only gives you an idea or a trend, but will never be accurate.

Comscore: Comscore is based on 2 million participants, which allows them to capture a broad view of surfing and buying behavior. Problem here is pretty much the same. Accuracy won’t be 100% for tech related websites.

Hitwise: Hitwise collects logfile data directly from the ISP networks (network-centric) and does not have a user-centric or site centric approach. They also combine this rich ISP data with a worldwide opt-in panel to overlay demographic, lifestyle and transactional behavior across the thousands of websites that are reported on every day.

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