The pur­suit of reli­able ways to mea­sure web traf­fic has come a long way from web coun­ters and hit counts, but stan­dard­ized, inde­pen­dent traf­fic fig­ures are still on shaky ground. 

All major meth­ods of traf­fic mea­sure­ment — from inter­nal to exter­nal web log analy­sis, to panel meth­ods and ISP packet-​sniffing — are flawed in some aspect.

But major changes may be in the air. Big play­ers Com­Score and Nielsen Online — chas­tened by a bruis­ing con­fronta­tion with the Inter­ac­tive Adver­tis­ing Bureau over mas­sive dis­crep­an­cies — sub­mit­ted to audits and are seek­ing accred­i­ta­tion by the Media Rat­ing Coun­cil. They’re roar­ing back this year with com­pet­ing pro­grams that promise to deliver more accu­rate mea­sure­ments, as well as steps to come to grips with Web 2.0 features.

My arti­cle “Mea­sur­ing Up: Web 2.0 poses dif­fi­culty for site traf­fick­ers” sketches the his­tory of web traf­fic met­rics and the state of the art.

Tagged as: page views, traffic analysis, unique users, web privacy, Web trends