How do you count your web hits

As newsprint declines taking its advertising revenue with it,media organisations need to be able to accurately measure the traffic on their web sites as their need to attract alternate advertising revenues increases.

The New York Times carries a good article this morning exploring methodologies associated with this.

Explaining the problem the paper says

big media companies — including Time Warner, The Financial Times and The New York Times — are equally frustrated that their counts of Web visitors keep coming in vastly higher than those of the tracking companies. There are many reasons for the differences (such as how people who use the Web at home and at the office are counted), but the upshot is the same: the growth of online advertising is being stunted, industry executives say, because nobody can get the basic visitor counts straight.

The problem though is not new

media companies have haggled with advertisers over audience numbers for decades. Television broadcasters cannot prove how many people watch their shows. Print outlets have circulation numbers, but those do not capture multiple readers of each copy.

The problem on the net appears to be that each advertising company has its own method of counting page impressions and one of the major problems happens in the work place

online publishers say that their systems drastically undercount people who use the Web during work hours, particularly in offices where corporate software makes the wanderings invisible to the tracking systems .

This is going to be a continuing problem for web sites as more publishing moves to the web.