Forum Moderators: DixonJones
We have had a problem for a couple of years now where Nielsen is reporting roughly half the traffic our own internal logs are showing. I would prefer to blow this off, but a lot of ad agencies and potential sponsors rely on Nielsen numbers so I cannot.
On a call with them last week, we discovered that their definition of our site was completely inaccurate, they had us listed as a property of one of our major retail partners when we are an independent site and company, and they were not including some of the smaller sites we operate. We had this corrected and are hoping that their Feb numbers will be more in line with what we are reporting.
I personally do not think that projecting internet traffic by monitoring the habits of 50k people is accurate, but wanted to get some other opinions on how close Nielsen comes to what your traffic shows. This will help me figure out if Nielsen’s methodology is flawed or if it was a matter of poor definition of our site by them.
Do you have a lot of visitors that come to your site through work? Nielsen has a much smaller work and university panel than Comscore Media Metrix.
We have several websites in different niches.. all are off by about the same %.
Are any of your sites monitored by media metrix and do you find them to be any better? Again the whole purpose of this service is just so we can point to 3rd party numbers for the sake of selling sponsorship packages, so it might be better for us to switch to a more accurate service.
Nielsen provides nothing useful to us in terms of data about our site, and most of the competitive data they provide can be picked off Alexa so the only thing we really need is 3rd party validation.
I know it can be frustrating but believe me it's the same for your competitors. We all have the same problem of reporting validated numbers. Untill we get "standards for measuring web traffic" we will have to live with this - and I doubt it will come soon.
Another thing is, that mediabuyers need to understand the limitations of Nielsen and other reporting services better. You are completely right, that there are a major problem with demographics. I remember a couople of years ago when I was manager of a large scandinavian search engine and Nielsen entered the market. At that time they did not have any panel users in Schools or offices (in Denmark) - and thats where we got the majority of our users from. So, suddenly we where not the second biggest portal, but came out low on a top 50! Completely wrong in my oppinion but what could I do? Well, I did what I could to tech the market about the realities the best I could.
So, my best advise is: Teach you customers :)
