How to Read A Site Traffic Report

by Adam Herman, Jun 17, 2002, 12:00 AM

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Media planning without good research is like throwing darts in the dark. Sure you might get lucky and hit a bull’s-eye, but you’re more likely to miss the board altogether and put a hole in the wall. That’s right, bad planning is more than not choosing the perfect sites, it can actually hurt your plan.

Just choosing a group of websites in a category that might fit your client’s product and then heading straight to final negotiation may really miss the mark. There is so much more insightful data that can be gleaned from syndicated audience measurement to better differentiate sites by usage and audience demographic to make your plans more effective.

One such company that provides site traffic data is the Internet audience measurement service Nielsen// NetRatings, which was formed in October 1998 from a strategic alliance between Nielsen Media Research and NetRatings, Inc.

Nielsen//NetRatings’ research methodology is to base its measurement findings on a randomly recruited, representative panel of over 61,000 home- and 7,200 work-Internet users. Measurement software resides on the panelists’ computers and unobtrusively tracks and collects user activity in real time.

Among their many products and services, Nielsen// NetRatings offers a website report by property, domain, unique site, and site category that shows aggregated measures of audience Internet activity. These measurements include unique audience size, reach, page views, pages per person, and time per person. Additionally, the demographic information (age, gender, income, education, ethnicity, and occupation) on a site’s unique audience provides the same research tool that planners have been using for years for television and magazines.

Special drill-down features within a single report let you instantly: view audience demographics of a site, rank sites by unique audience or page views, view referring and destination sites, measure a site’s average click-through rate, view audience by locale, and compare sites by audience duplication.

“Media planners often do not take full advantage of the usage, time spent, and demographic details that are available for the Internet,” said Peggy O’Neill, NetRatings Inc.’s Internet Investment Strategies Director. “The Internet is more trackable than any other media and imaginative planners who use these reports can make much more targeted media buys. I think we are seeing this now as more buys are including non-portal, vertical sites than ever before.”

As we dig deep into a site traffic report on the following spread, you’ll see that the site with the most visitors isn’t necessarily the best site for your plan.

MediaPost VP of Operations Adam Herman can be reached at adam@mediapost.com.

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