Online Audiences Summed Up with Three Measures

Anyone who has worked in new media struggles with accurately measuring a Web site audience. It is much more difficult than counting newspaper subscribers. A newspaper has the address of a subscriber and knows how many single copies are sold at a newsstand. That’s not the case with online.

First the basics of online audience measurements:

The three most important measures are unique visitors, visits and page views.

A unique visitor is the unique IP address of a computer whose user is visiting your site. In the course of a month, let’s say a unique visitor comes to a site, views the home page and leaves. It would be measured as one unique visitor, visiting one time and viewing one page.

Now let’s say that unique visitor comes back a second time during the same month, views only the home page and leaves again. The total measure for the month is one unique visitor, two visits and two page views.

Page views are important because they help measure total advertising inventory. Let’s further say that your site has three ad positions on every page. In the example above, you now have one unique visitor, two visits, two page views and six ad impressions.

So for the sake of revenue, the more page views, the better.

The visits measure tells you a great deal about frequency. Like newspapers and broadcast, the sales and marketing value of a Web site is about reach and frequency. Surprisingly, the typical newspaper Web site has only two to three visits per unique visitor per month.

Some local people have the site set as their browser home page; they drive a high number of monthly visits. Visitors to your site from search engines may visit only one time, view one page and never come back again. They drive the frequency number back down. So optimizing a site for search engines may increase the unique visitors but drive down the frequency of visits.

Unique visitors is the most important measure of the three but also the most difficult one. A unique visitor can be an IP address of a computer at home. But the home may have one occupant or five, all of whom may use that computer. Likewise, a person can use one computer at work and another at home. She is only one person but two “unique visitors” because she is using two computers. To overcome these issues, the best current way to measure a local online audience is through qualitative surveys and site registration.

Online newspapers are getting better at measuring audiences and looking at them in similar ways with similar terminology. We can hope eventually we will get as good at measuring our local audiences as accurately as our circulation departments do with newspapers.

Scott Bateman is an Internet consultant with the Virginia Press Association and a former online general manager with Media General and Cox Enterprises. He can be reached at (804) 521-7577 or scottb@vpa.net.