Skip to main content icon/video/no-internet
icon backReturn to Entries

Metrics

Web metrics—methods of tracing who uses a Web site and how the site is used—have evolved considerably over the short life of the World Wide Web. Although the ways of collecting information have changed little, analysis and integration of this data is now far more intensive than it was in the early days, driven largely by the needs of commerce. Metrics are now used as part of a wider “Web analytics” that extends beyond the Web site itself to business processes and performance.

The grandfather of all Internet metrics is the hit, or the request made for an individual Web page. Many Web sites have hit counters indicating how many visitors have come to the site. There are several ways to generate counts of individual hits, but most often they are assembled from information recorded in server logs, which note the time of each server request and some information about the computer making the request.

While tracking Web-page hits provides some indication of the change in popularity of a page, very little else can be inferred from such a simple measure. Someone who reloaded a page, or crossed over it more than once, would be counted each time. If an individual or organization cached (or saved) a copy of the page, however, only a single hit would be recorded. For example, if many hundreds of AOL users visit a site, the site owner might see only a single hit, since AOL retains a copy of each page for later visitors. Previously, this inaccuracy was inconsequential, but with the expansion of commerce on the Web, accurate measurements became a necessity.

Advertising

Vital to a growing advertising market was a set of standards that would accurately reflect the value of online advertisements. While some of these standards related to the way that advertisements were handled (standard sizes for banner ads, for example), others related directly to the measurement of how effective those advertisements were. The number of hits an advertisement received was clearly an inadequate way of determining its value.

The first systems of measurement, which might be called passive systems, evolved from analyzing server logs. For example, by examining the referring Web page and the location of a given client, a path that the user followed through the site could be inferred. A number of products have been developed to assist in this process, and are in wide use.

Generally, advertisements, online and off, are sold by impressions—that is, the number of times that a particular advertisement will be viewed by an audience member. This method of pricing is sometimes called “pay per view.” While this has remained the standard for many years, some advertisers prefer to pay instead for clicks on their banners, a practice called “pay per click.” (Note that the terms click and clickthrough are now generally used interchangeably in Web advertising.) Even if an advertiser does not pay directly for clicks, it will be concerned with the click rate, which is the percentage of impressions that lead to a click.

Advertisers have turned to a number of other metrics that attempt to place a value on an advertisement's effectiveness. Cost per thousand impressions (CPM) is a standard measure taken from advertising in other media. The CPM for Web advertising tends to be closer to that of magazines than to that of television, because Web advertising, like magazine advertising, provides access to a much narrower demographic. Since CPM tends to paint costs and benefits with too broad a brush, other measures have emerged, including cost per thousand targeted (CPTM), which accounts for a particular demographic; cost per action (CPA), which measures the number of actions generated by an advertisement (requesting further information, for example); cost per click (CPC); and cost per sale (CPS).

...

  • Loading...
locked icon

Sign in to access this content

Get a 30 day FREE TRIAL

  • Watch videos from a variety of sources bringing classroom topics to life
  • Read modern, diverse business cases
  • Explore hundreds of books and reference titles

Read next

More like this

Sage Recommends

We found other relevant content for you on other Sage platforms.

close

Have you created a personal profile? Login or create a profile so that you can save clips, playlists and searches

close
close
close Signed In to profile You are signed in as:
close
Logged in Institution Institution