The exact science of measuring web traffic

Web-traffic measurement, despite recent advances, remains fraught with conflicting numbers. The Internet's inherent accountability, stemming from the digital trace left by every Web site visit, has spawned a multitude of measures, but little clarity.

That's the conclusion of the Wall Street journal which over the weekend took an in depth look at the science of measuring web flow.

Amongst the problems identified,hits could be the same person from different machines,whereas smaller sites are saying that these inflated figures could cost them when advertisers seeking a broad reach dismiss them because of their seemingly paltry audience sizes.

Tracking traffic by copy and paste usage

Traffic and page views are nice, but engaged readers and loyal audiences are more important.

writes Zachary M. Seward over at Nieman.

Introducing discussion on how best to track traffic he has

been playing with new software, already in use on some major news sites, that offers a partial solution by tracking an unusual metric: how many times users copy text and images from each page — and what they’re copying.

The software is called Tracer whose

functionality is apparent when you copy and paste any significant chunk of text from a website that’s using the service.