Comments on: Traffic is Magical

By: Almost Girl » Blog Archive » Coutorture Education: Understanding Analytics

Sun, 30 Mar 2008 22:54:06 +0000

[...] Here are some resources you might want to wander through to help understand the points I talked about including log file analysis versus page tagging, hits and why they are so inflated, pageviews versus uniques and all that stuff. Naturally wikipedia has some good stuff. Here is a great listing of cool things you can do with Google Analytics. One of my favorite pieces on analytics is called “Traffic Is a Metric, Nothing More” and then a sequel for the more politically incorrect called Traffic Is Magical. [...]

By: Scrivs

Scrivs — Fri, 15 Dec 2006 16:28:23 +0000

I’m not sure our reach would be 8M visitors (I could be extremely wrong here) since we touch upon niches that aren’t known for their large amounts of traffic, but it definitely would be an interesting number to see.

Myspace is a large amount of people, but the main number that gets thrown around is the pageviews, which obviously are extremely high because people like to play voyeur and look at everyone’s profile and pictures. Same with Facebook I’m sure.

By: Tony

Tony — Fri, 15 Dec 2006 16:13:46 +0000

Well 9rules do run Google Analytics.

I think a good example to include here are the requirements to get into the ReviewMe.com’s program. They check your blog’s:

Google PR – organic traffic
Technorati standing – referal traffic
Alexa traffic – another measure to normolize the above

And if they could, I bet they’d want to measure FeedBurner’s stats for the number of subscribers – direct traffic.

The entire MySpace thing also highlights traffic as “magical” – they’ve got crap design and below average users, but that’s a _lot_ of users. I’m disappointed in the internets.

By: Kyle Korleski

Kyle Korleski — Fri, 15 Dec 2006 13:50:17 +0000

Yeah. I would wonder if 9rules would place a counter that tracks member hits and provides counters for communities and the network at large.

By: franticindustries

franticindustries — Fri, 15 Dec 2006 12:34:32 +0000

I know of a similar example, where a blogging network in Croatia (www.blog.hr – don’t bother, it’s in Croatian) claims to have huge traffic numbers based on the number of visits to ALL BLOGS COMBINED. Yet, when my friend’s blog reached their front page both on the ‘fresh blogs’ list an as a first news item on the page, he received under 100 unique views daily from that particular source of traffic. So, what does this tell you? Yes, maybe they have lots of blogs in the network, which are visited every day by – if noone else – the blog authors themselves. But a banner placed on their front page is worth no more than a few bucks.