Main source of income for big names in the Internet advertising based on the ability of these actors to generate audience and the “sell” to advertisers in the form of sponsored links, banners and other graphic forms of sponsoring. But the extent of this audience remains a complex discipline. What are the main principles? Who are the actors? What are the limits of different solutions? Net Eco offers a quick tour d’horizon. User Centric vs.
Site Centric Nielsen For nearly a decade, two opposing schools of thought in the world of audience measurement: the user-centric, based on studying the behavior of the Internet, and the site centric “s’ pressing on data obtained by consulting a website. The first track, after the world media like television and endorsed by major advertisers, based on the constitution by institutes independent panels of a few thousand people (about 8 000 for Mediametrie Nielsen and more than 20 000 to COM score ). The computers of members of these panels are equipped with software specifically analyzing their behavior on the web: what applications used, which media consulted, what e-commerce sites frequented, etc…. This behavior of a few thousand people is then extrapolated, according to statistical laws, the population of 25 million Internets French, which allows to estimate the hearing of a medium or a merchant online.
To this vision “user centric” opposes the “site centric” based on data collected directly from the website. This can be done directly from its own web server with the analysis of logs, through a server banners (assuming that all pages of a site displaying banners) or via the installation “trackers” directly into the HTML pages of a website. These trackers are provided by specialized ups Xiti or Weborama but also by a large panel as Mediametrie, who recently offered estate or Google, which now offers free webmasters the excellent Google Analytics. The limits of the “User Centric” Alexa Google
Despite its success with advertisers, the “User Centric” may commit mistakes if the behavior of its panel is not representative. Recently, the company Alexa, whose panel is based on the behavior of Internet users have installed its toolbar, for example, asserted that the hearing of You Tube (about 100 million unique visitors) was now bigger than Google ( approximately 500 million unique visitors). A blunder quickly spotted by Michael Arrington, editor of Tec crunch, who recalls that this service-which has the merit of being free-east, however, far from being able to compete with major panels.
A few weeks ago, Tariq krim, founder of Net vibes, also disputed the conclusions of COM score, which assigns an audience of 359 000 monthly unique visitors to its service start page, while the latter claims ten times more. A gap can be explained, according to him, by the under-representation of technophiles in panels theoretically designed to represent the whole population… The limits of “site-centric” Xiti Based on measurements on servers or trackers, tools “site centric” are not free from criticism. Last July, Delphine GATIGNOL, in charge of Comscore France, explained in our columns as tools of this type had a tendency to count several times a single visitor. “Imagine that you connect to NetEco.com from your office and from your home and that each time that you also use Internet Explorer and Fire fox. For a tool centric site that uses cookies, this behavior is 4 or 8 distinct persons while the panel would of course account for only one single visitor to the site. “She explained. A bias which may even turn into a ravine for sites aimed at a readership of technophiles with a not inconsiderable regularly deletes “cookies” left by trackers. Thus, instead of being admitted every day, a daily visitor attending a site can be counted on 30 times a month while it is again only one “unique visitor”… A quick calculation indicates that when only 5% of visitors regularly erase their traces, a site centric account at the end of the month 25,000 ‘unique visitors’ on a site while only 10,000 visitors come every day .. Measuring something else? Hit wise the debate “user centric” or “site centric”, however, could gradually become obsolete with the emergence of new measurement criteria. Recently, the institute has, for example, Nielsen plans to relativise the concept of “unique visitor” in favor of a new indicator: time. “The time spent on a site is a better measure of commitment to an Internet website or an application. “Explained Scott Ross, Marketing Director classifying Nielsen / / Net ratings. Finally, note the existence of measures combining without doubt the best of both worlds: the analysis of IP traffic access providers provided by companies such as Hitwise. Indeed, by analyzing precisely what passes through the pipes of North American suppliers (each site visited, each image loaded, each VoIP call,…), the service provides comprehensive and accurate figures on consumption of all internet subscribers. A study a priori objective but is unfortunately not yet available in France…
Jun 16