Facebook searches:  Google opposite to Hitwise
By Bala Shah

Every day, millions of dollars are paid to news, entertainment and social networking websites and blogs to advertise goods and services. All based on what the websites and blogs claim their traffic is. But it is an open secret among the website administrators and techies that no one is quite sure how many people actually visit their site.

Good idea, yes.  Even 90 percent sure, no. The advertising team of any website gives figures and spreadsheets to potential advertisers, and they are rarely challenged.  Also, it is accepted but unsaid that it is quite easy for any tech savvy website to game the system to ‘increase’ traffic.

The fact is that while most website traffic monitoring tools can give you a good idea, no one is 100 percent sure.

Britain-based Mobile Industry Review is a highly regarded daily service providing news and opinion to over 250,000 mobile industry executives and fanatics around the world. Technology savvy Mobile Industry Review has been honest enough to admit that it lacks the exact number of people who visit them.  Their website states: “Audience size - This is a contentious subject for us, because, simply, we don’t know just how big our audience is. In January 2008, we tracked 350,000 unique hosts visiting the site and we use four different statistics packages to track our RSS and site visits. We’re unable to accurately measure the entire readership because our news feed is openly available, parsed and integrated into hundreds of web and private databases. We know we’re viewed by many large corporate intranets as we can often track the referring visits from them. We estimate our audience to be at least 250,000 per month, but in practice we suspect it might be much larger.”

America’s No. 1 tech blog has today published an article which shows the search statistics of two internationally accepted monitoring tools – Hitwise and Google Analytics -  are the exact opposite of each other. Techcrunch reports: “It’s no secret how bad most of the analytics firms are at gathering statistically relevant data about Internet traffic. All of them, Quantcast, Comscore, Hitwise, Compete, Alexa, etc., are flawed in various ways and to various degrees. But today’s blog post by Hitwise shows just how bad their data really is. They say that Craigslist is now the top searched term on the Internet, taking that honor from MySpace. Facebook is third. Google trends shows exactly the opposite data as Hitwise - Facebook is by far the most queried term, followed by MySpace and then Craigslist.”

While the techcrunch article refers to what is searched on the net, at many levels it is a reflection on the methodologies and processes used by internationally accepted monitoring tools.

Except for a handful of tech savvy advertisors, most accept Hitwise and Google as gospel.  So, if their client comes and says Hitwise shows 100 thousand visitors a month, the advertiser will shell out the advertising dollars.  If Google differs, the figures will never be brought up in the meeting between website and potential advertiser.

And if you think that this is only a problem with new media like websites and blogs, be assured that it exists in old media like newspapers as well.  Despite claims of being independently audited, many national newspapers and magazines exaggerate their reach.