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    Categories: Media Usage

What services do you trust for measuring web traffic to your site?

I’ve been engrossed in the topic of web measurement the past couple weeks, with a two-part series here at MediaShift. In the first part, I wondered why the web, which is supposed to be the most measurable medium ever (putting TV and radio audience measurement to shame), is still so inconsistent with so few standards in place. If you write a blog or run a website, what web traffic numbers do you trust? Your own server logs, or web analytics firms such as WebTrends or Omniture, or Alexa or HitWise? Or do you feel that Nielsen and comScore do a decent job of gauging traffic? How do you think web measurement could be improved? Share your thoughts in the comments below and I’ll run the best ones in a future Your Take Roundup.

Mark Glaser :Mark Glaser is founder and executive director of MediaShift. He contributes regularly to Digital Content Next’s InContext site and newsletter. Glaser is a longtime freelance journalist whose career includes columns on hip-hop, reviews of videogames, travel stories, and humor columns that poked fun at the titans of technology. From 2001 to 2005, he wrote a weekly column for USC Annenberg School of Communication's Online Journalism Review. Glaser has written essays for Harvard's Nieman Reports and the website for the Yale Center for Globalization. Glaser has written columns on the Internet and technology for the Los Angeles Times, CNET and HotWired, and has written features for the New York Times, Conde Nast Traveler, Entertainment Weekly, the San Jose Mercury News, and many other publications. He was the lead writer for the Industry Standard's award-winning "Media Grok" daily email newsletter during the dot-com heyday, and was named a finalist for a 2004 Online Journalism Award in the Online Commentary category for his OJR column. Glaser won the Innovation Journalism Award in 2010 from the Stanford Center for Innovation and Communication. Glaser received a Bachelor of Journalism and Bachelor of Arts in English at the University of Missouri at Columbia, and currently lives in San Francisco with his wife Renee and his two sons, Julian and Everett. Glaser has been a guest on PBS' "Newshour," NPR's "Talk of the Nation," KALW's "Media Roundtable" and TechTV's "Silicon Spin." He has given keynote speeches at Independent Television Service's (ITVS) Diversity Retreat and the College Media Assocation's national convention. He has been part of the lecture/concert series at Yale Law School and Arkansas State University, and has moderated many industry panels. He spoke in May 2013 to the Maui Business Brainstormers about the "Digital Media Revolution." To inquire about speaking opportunities, please use the site's Contact Form.

View Comments (3)

  • First, Id like to thank you for tackling this complex subject. It was a well-written, straightforward examination of a issue Ive been following for years.

    I manage several web sites for a large academic medical center that get around 1.6 million visitors per month. To track our traffic, we use a combination of Webtrends for server logs, and Google Analytics (GA) for hosted reports. GA uses code embedded in our pages that sends data back to Google for analysis. The numbers between both systems are very close.

    For competitive information we use Quantcast. It has been fairly accurate, even on domains with low traffic, and the demographic information provided is very useful.

    Cant speak to HitWise, ComScore or Nielson - they are out of our price range

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