Circulation
Some one once said 'there are lies, damned lies and statistics'. They could have been referring to circulation figures for Internet sites. Circulation on the Internet is an area where exaggeration and hype abound. Claims are made for circulation that are wildly out of step with reality. This article attempts to explain some of the pitfalls and to give you a basis for comparing the many figures bandied about.
Measuring real circulation is important if you are planning to spend money with an Internet company. You need to have sound figures that can be used to measure the effectiveness of your spend. And you need confidence that the figures are genuine and have not been inflated.
Beware of Hits - Hits are nonsense. Hits are inflationary. Hits are no-go. Hits is a term that is often heard when describing the popularity of an Internet site. It is a term used by people who do not know any better. They are not aware of the term's real meaning. To understand what is wrong with the term 'Hit' we need to understand a little of how Internet sites record their activity.
A good Internet server - the computer that stores your Internet site - will have an activity log file. This file records all requests sent to it for pages, images, documents, programs and anything else that your server stores for you. Each time a request is made to it, an entry is made in the log file. When you accessed this page just now, new lines were added to the log file on our server. Because the log records all activity it not only recorded the request you made for this page but it also recorded the fact that the page consists of some HTML code and some images. This page has an image at the top corner - the logo - and another which you cannot see which is used as a spacer to hold things in place on the page. The log file therefore had three new lines written to it, one for the HTML and two for the images that the server supplied to you. If we had used images to make buttons for the navigation on the left-hand side we would have needed another sixteen images on the page. If we had wanted nice mouse-over effects on those images so that they changed colour as you run the cursor over them we would have required double that number. The total lines recorded in our log file would have been the original three plus thirty-two more every time you visited the page.
There are other ways that your log file gets inflated. When the Search Engines index your site, they send a robot to have a look at the content. This happens without your knowledge and is something you would want to encourage. The problem is that they all add lines to the log file as they look around. A robot can add hundreds (sometimes thousands) of additional log file entries. Multiply that by the many search engines and you begin to see the inflationary effect this has on the file.
So what is the problem with hits? Hits simply count the lines in the log file and claim that figure as the circulation. Now you can see that on this basis the page you are looking at has had three hits when you downloaded it - the HTML plus the two images. We could have increased our hit count by adding images to the navigation and then we could have claimed 35 Hits for your one single visit. You can begin to see the problem with claims for high Hit rates.
Page Impressions - To be fair, your viewing of this page should be counted once only. All the extra images and the surplus lines in the log file should be ignored. The term that is becoming the standard for this is known as 'Page Impressions'. It can also be referred to as 'Page Views', 'Page Downloads' or 'Complete Page Downloads'. It means that the number of Page Impressions equals the number of times the server sent the page out to the world. All the entries for images and search engine robots and Uncle Tom Cobbley have been filtered out of the log file to give a more genuine count.
The term Hits is used by the uninformed and by those deliberately setting out to mislead. Avoid the term at all costs. If someone claims a particular Hit Rate, then have a smile to yourself, pat them on the head and walk away!
Applegate only publish the actual number of Page Impressions. Our log files are available if you really want to inspect them. All our claims to circulation are as honest and above criticism as we can make them. If you want to know more, then call us and we will be happy to discuss.
Page Impressions vs. Visits - The number of actual visits to a site is a difficult figure to quantify. Page Impressions can be measured, but how this equates to the number of distinct visits depends on a number of factors.
1) From our evaluations, we know that visitors to Applegate view around four pages per visit. This is a reference site and therefore visitors are viewing with a specific objective in mind. When we record eight million Page Impressions in a period, then this equates to about 2,000,000 different visits to the site.
2) The number of Page Impressions is always understated, and probably quite considerably so. Increasingly, the larger ISPs are caching the more popular pages on their own servers. This improves the speed of delivery to the end-user. Caching means that when the page is first requested it is copied from our site and stored on the ISP's server. We get a single Page Impression count. Each successive request via that ISP is then supplied from the ISP's own cache, not from our site. This means that we do not get an addition to the Page Impression count although the page is being viewed by more people. Larger companies also use this caching system.
