NONE: ONLINE-ADS>> Surveys, cache busting, and cookies
ONLINE-ADS>> Surveys, cache busting, and cookies
Glenn Fleishman (glenn_at_popco.com)
Wed, 18 Feb 1998 12:43:13 -0800
I'm going to respond to a few threads to save bandwidth.
>From: Steve Runfeldt <Steve_at_CustomerSat.com>
>I think that it is important to note too that
>all surveys are in essence self selected. Even telephone
>surveys allow the respondent to decline. The fact is that no
>consumer survey escapes this bias to one degree or another.
>The question is, to what degree...?
This misses the point. Any well-conducted phone survey attempts to gather
some number of people with certain characteristics, whether race,
ethnicity, gender, age, time spent online, membership in certain
organizations, etc. If a telephone surveyer is turned down (which probably
happens most of the time), they call another person - they don't reduce the
size of the sample by one.
The point of methodology and building some kind of relationship between the
people who participate in a survey and the conclusions that are drawn is to
a) allow others to analyze the results, b) have apples-to-apples
comparisons, and c) provide an estimate of accuracy or error rate.
I'm not saying that polls or surveys are perfect when they're conducted by
phone. But I am saying that statistical science underlies good market
research and polling.
>This approach, too, provides
>much better sampling than a simple open invitation to a
>survey.
Too easy and more likely for people to lie on the Web, although I agree an
invitation to a percentage of visitors (based on behavior, preferably) is
superior to a general call to fill out a survey with no limitations.
Rick Bruner <rick_at_bruner.net> wrote:
>As far as I understand,
>MatchLogic's True Count, before trying to serve the ad,
>sends a ping to the proxy server inquiring whether the ad it
>wants to serve is already in the proxy's cache.
I'd like to know more about this. I don't know of any proxy server that
responds to queries in this manner. The HTTP transaction is always client
driven: the browser sends a request, the server responds. When a proxy is
involved, the browser queries the proxy, the proxy uses rules to determine
whether to query the actual server. Some proxies (as I understand it) will
even do a simple HEAD query to the server to see if the file has changed
before doing an actual retrieval (a GET).
The scenario Rick describes doesn't work for me. The proxy server gets
queried by the browser before a request for an ad would go out; the ad
server isn't in the equation until post-proxy. The only variation I can see
on this is if specific proxy servers were rewritten to do this kind of
query on demand, but it's still proxy->ad server connection driven, not
vice-versa.
Clarification? Not to get too technical, but I think the bottom line here
is still at stake.
"Martin Thorborg" <martin_at_jubii.dk> wrote:
>We are running Jubii Denmarks largest site. It is a search engine and
>we serve 2 million users/month delivering more than 7 million
>pageviews. We started using cookies 6 month ago, and out of our
>500.000 unique users, we got 10 complaints.
But how many unique visitors accept cookies, not complain about them?
------------------------------------------------------------------------
Glenn Fleishman, unsolicited pundit. see my mug: http://www.glenns.org
writer, perl hacker, Adobe Magazine columnist/editor . fax 206.285.0308
co-author of Real World Scanning & Halftones, 2nd edition, on press soon
conference chair, Web Marketing '98/Seattle http://www.thunderlizard.com
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