Measurement And Characterization

The goal of every webmaster is to develop the audience of his website, i.e. to increase the number of daily visits. It is thus essential to have indicators allowing a measure of traffic growth of its website, known as “audience measurement” or of “Audimetrie” and other by qualifying his audience to provide content closer to the expectations of its audience.

How to measure the audience of a website

There are basically three options for measuring traffic to a website:

• The use of newspapers (log files) of web server by a special tool. It is to choose a tool capable of analyzing the activity logs Web server and build a dashboard containing key indicators of Web site usage.
• The development of a system of ad hoc statistics. It is possible on a website, storing each load a page of information for the visitor to exploit later. For web sites with heavy traffic, such devices can cause significant CPU and a high rate of disk space, especially if the data are stored in a system of database management.
• The use of a service “audience measurement”. This system consists of inserting into each page a “tag” allowing for measuring traffic to collect data on a server. This type of service has the advantage of saving material resources because all processing is done on the remote server. In addition, the company offering the service takes care of changing the panel indicators and dashboards proposed to be in line with constantly changing technologies of Internet access and web browsers.

Terminology

The terminology of statistics and indicators attendance websites is relatively complex and often varies from one tool to another. However, when used for comparative studies or marketing, indicators of audience measurement are meaningful only when the words used correspond to a common comparative basis (we do not compare cabbage and carrots). It is particularly important to control the definitions of each indicator. Thus this issue aims to give meaning to different terms used in the world of audience measurement. Most indicators defined below are from the work of CEPA (Center for the Study of media advertising).

Hits

A web page may be composed of a number of files, including pictures of one or more style sheets, JavaScript files, etc. A “hit” corresponds to a file loaded by the browser. A web page containing three images will thus correspond to four hits.

Page view

A “page views” (or “broadcast page”) on a full load a web page after a user action on the page (typically a click). The concept of page views is unclear because it depends heavily on the architecture of each website. A framed page (frames) and may not be recognized in the same way as a simple web page.

Visit

A visit is the consultation of a site during a session, regardless of the number or volume of pages viewed. A visit is only meaningful over time (day, week, month), we talk and visits daily, weekly or monthly. The number of visits indicates the number of jobs that came to the site over a given period.

Visitor / unique visitor

The concept of “visitor” is to understand the meaning of individual. It is “number of visitors” the number of individuals who accessed the site on a given period.