Web Analytics in Europe, Part I (Guest Post by Per Strid)

Guest writer: Per Strid

The need for standards

Standards are in many fields an absolute must. In the 1790s the French originated the meter as one/ten-millionth of the distance from the equator to the north pole along a meridian through Paris. At first it was realistically represented by the distance between two marks on an iron bar kept in Paris. In 1875 the International Bureau of Weights and Measures was created, and they upgraded the bar to one made of 90 percent platinum/10 percent iridium alloy. As one should suspect, the iron bar was more sensitive to cold and heat.

This rod was still mentioned as the standard when I went to compulsory school in the mid 1960s. That’s how old I am…

Humans have always been great adopters of high tech however, and in 1960 the meter was redefined as 1,650,763.73 wavelenghts of orange-red light, in vacuum, produced by burning the element krypton (Kr-86).

In 1984 a new upgrade was made by the Geneva Conference on Weights and Measures. Now the definition of a meter is the distance light travels, in vacuum, in 1/299,792,458 seconds with time measured by a cesium-133 atomic clock. That’s a very nice piece of clock. Do you want me to define the second?

Funny thing is that all of the four standards are the same. It’s only the technique of defining that differs.

Today we are desperately trying to find common standards in order to measure web traffic. It’s quiet important to agree upon standards when buying and selling advertisements on the Internet.

There is one standard agreed on how to define ad-impressions. The last update I found was named 2292 version 6.0b, issued by IAB (Interactive Advertising Bureau) in September 2004. It’s seventeen pages so I will save you…

In November 2006 the WAA (Web Analytics Association) issued a paper trying to define the Big Three Definitions. These three are “Unique Visitors”, “Visits/Sessions” and “Page Views”.

To sum this paper up it says “Ask your vendor”…

Sweden has a long and genuine tradition in the field of statistics, and statistics rely a lot on standards and definitions. KIA, which in English would spell CIA (!), stands for the Committee for Internet Advertisers and has for unknown reasons chosen to refrain from standards the way at least I am used to see them.

Instead they started to sanction certain vendors of web analytics solutions. First out was Sifo Research International, and later Nielsen//NetRatings. In 2006 many other vendors claimed this was a competitive obstruction. KIA and their associates Ecentric.org realized they had a point. So they approved WebSideStory and Instadia on top after testing against the other two. Google Analytics failed since it diverged more than +-7% from the “references”.

So far no cow on the ice, as we say in Sweden. But when KIA suddenly withdrew, or stopped publishing, numbers for some large web sites, something must be questioned.

Sifo Research International’s Insight XE was using third party cookies, and all of a sudden a couple of integrity/anti virus programs had started blocking those. This affected mainly large sites with a lot of traffic and the numbers where useless.

Wouldn’t it be a lot easier to set up a standard for measuring the traffic and leave it to any vendor to follow that standard, and thus any web site owner to freely choose vendor? Please!

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Per Strid is located in Uppsala, Sweden. He is a long time web analyst who started in 1998 with NetGenesis. In 2001 he rejoined Nocom who was a master distributor for WebTrends. Before his web analytics career he was a marketing analyst working for a Swedish railroad company. He has several degrees in economics, political science and statistics from Uppsala University, Sweden. Among his web analytics skills are also Google Analytics, Google AdWords and Google Website Optimizer (multivariate analysis is cool!). E-mail marketing is also an area that he has a good command of. He recently started the web site www.webbanalytiker.nu which is aimed to be a start of a community for web analysts in Sweden. Need advice? Just give a call or send an e-mail!

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Soundtrack: Green Day - Good Riddance (Time of Your Life)
(soundtrack selected by Lars)

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