Re: DART data interpretation question
Jean-Philippe Bedard wrote:
>The metric from Doubleclick tells me I received 3000 clicks from banners.
>But I just can't see these clicks in the "Referrals site" metric from the
>traffic report I produce internally which is more around 400 within the same
>timeframe.
>
>WHY!
When Jean-Phillipe asked me this one directly,
I directed him to this list. Sure enough, the
answers found here were much more detailed than
I could have provided. Great referral to
Webmasterworld.com, Jason!
My rule of thumb is to never expect two
systems to tell you the same thing. Web
analytics is *not* an exact science. We're
dealing with:
Different serving software
Different data gathering techniques
Different data cleansing techniques
Different data integration methods
Different data analysis techniques
Different reporting conventions
Different result interpretation approaches
Not to mention bad data to begin with!
So what's a webmaster to do?
Use one set of tools to baseline the activity
on your site and look very closely at how your
numbers change over time. Your numbers really
don't matter - how they *change* makes all the
difference in the world.
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Jim Sterne http://www.targeting.com
==========================================================
Emetrics Summit http://www.emetrics.org/summit604
May 24-26, London web analytics conference
June 2-4, Santa Barbara +1-805-965-3184
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Received on Mon Mar 08 2004 - 08:53:33 CST
