 Poster: A snowHead
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When the Ski Club says its website received 650,000 unique visitors last season, what does this actually mean?
I suspect it doesn't mean that 650,000 different people came and looked at the site, but wondered if anyone could hazard a guess as to what the Ski Club means by the term?
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Obviously A snowHead isn't a real person
Obviously A snowHead isn't a real person
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No it probably means just that, the fact that hardley any of them posted is neither here nor there, though possibly a few had multiple identities
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Well, the person's real but it's just a made up name, see?
Well, the person's real but it's just a made up name, see?
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My guess is that it was 650,000 different ip addresses. It's possible that they had around that number, as most people I know use SCGB site to check snow reports.
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You need to Login to know who's really who.
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| Quote: |
Ski Club says its website received 650,000 unique visitors last season
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Visits quite likely - but 'unique' less likely. Would they be able to check ? They were unable or unwilling to implement decent bulletin board software like this.
As Elizabeth says many would visit the site for reasons other than to enter the discussion forums.
And what does 'last season' mean ?
Isn't this just another bit of less than informative comment from SCGB about internet related matters ?
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Anyway, snowHeads is much more fun if you do.
Anyway, snowHeads is much more fun if you do.
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I think, on reflection, it comes down to whether the Ski Club is using cookies to measure unique visitors or relying on the site's logs. In the latter case, I'd guess it's overestimating figures due to the way IP addresses are allocated. In the former, it will miss the small number of people who reject cookies for one reason or another. Doubt we'll ever know how the figures are calculated - but it would be interesting to know.
While we're on stats, I wonder why no figures have been reported since Dec 03 (and Dec's figures are incomplete).
I'd also be curious to know whether the Club will publish any figures for skiandboard.co.uk...
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You'll need to Register first of course.
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An aside - is U measuring visitors to snowHeads, and does he have any current stats?
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Oooooo, the world is a cynical place isn't it!
As www.skiclub.co.uk 's website manager I can assure you that skiclub.co.uk did have over 650,000 unique visitors from 1st May 2002 - 30 April 2003. We will run this year's annual statistics in May 2004.
Our annual unique visitor statistic is worked out by running the entire year's log files together - this provides us with an the number of different IP addresses visiting the website during the year. (If we simply added up each month's unique visitor figure we would get duplications of individuals that visited in say January, then February. That would be misleading!) Of course there will always be the people that visit our site from home, work and perhaps a lap-top - they could be counted 3 times. But then you also have people looking at the website withing a company where only the external IP address is counted so perhaps 10 people are counted just once. That is the nature of the Internet!
For your information our biggest month yet was January 2003 with 201,330 unique visitors looking at 6,840,763 pages. From 1 May 2002 - 30 April 2003 22,966,215 pages were looked at.
And thanks for the prompting - I must go in and add the recent stats to the advertising page on skiclub.co.uk!!!
For your information, www.skiandboard.co.uk in it's first 2 weeks had 1,474 unique visitors and 12,312 page impressions.
That's all from me!
Laura 
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Hi Laura - nice to hear from you again. TKS for clarifying things.
I suspect your graphs will be heading downhill faster than the Terminator soon. 
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You'll get to see more forums and be part of the best ski club on the net.
You'll get to see more forums and be part of the best ski club on the net.
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Hi Laura! Nice to see you're still dropping in
kuwait_ian, SCGB site stats should hold up pretty well since my guess is that a most of the traffic will be on the snow reports pages - rather than our old "shouting in a box" haunt.
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Sorry Kuwait Ian, the other Ian is right.
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snowHeads are a friendly bunch.
snowHeads are a friendly bunch.
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And love to help out and answer questions and of course, read each other's snow reports.
And love to help out and answer questions and of course, read each other's snow reports.
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I stand corrected - No probs.
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I don't think the figures will be tanking - but there are limits to the use of IP addresses to measure visitors. As I understand it, anyone logging in on a dial-up connection will be dynamically allocated a different IP address every time they connect to the Internet. People using AOL accounts (the UK's biggest ISP), may show as different IP addresses every time they request a page. Server-side caches complicate the picture further.
Wired Digital comments: "This method [counting IP addresses] becomes increasingly inaccurate if you're examining data over longer time periods. We only use this information in our calculations at Wired Digital as a last resort, and then only when we're looking at a single day's worth of data."
Cookies are more accurate, but still have limits.
This is a good backgrounder: http://hotwired.lycos.com/webmonkey/98/16/index2a_page6.html?tw=e-business. It suggests that IP counting can lead to underestimates as well as overestimates.
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You know it makes sense.
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My only comment on this is that the Ski Club uses the Audit Bureau of Circulations (ABC) to vet the circulation data of its magazine. I believe ABC are also now vetting website visitor data, so I imagine they're one good organisation to independently verify any data. Is the Club using the ABC, or another independent audit body, for verification?
This visitor data is important. What matters more to members, in my view, is that we know that enough money is being spent on the website vis-a-vis the Club's other services, and that the cost-effectiveness of the expenditure is correctly measured, vis-a-vis the Club's other services.
In other words, what's the cost-per-member using the website, compared to the cost-per-member of magazines, reps, discount book, and the other key services?
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Otherwise you'll just go on seeing the one name:
Otherwise you'll just go on seeing the one name:
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See I told you it really would be that number, Now I wonder what marches figures for unique people in the forums will be 
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Poster: A snowHead
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ABC's electronic division (ABCE) are mainly focused on ad impressions etc, but they use International Federation of Audit Bureaux definitions for a variety of metrics, including unique users.
Unique users can be measured in three ways: (i) IP address plus an identifier from the user's browser; (ii) Cookies; (iii) Registration IDs.
ABCE comment: "Where USERs are allocated IP addresses dynamically (for example by dial-up Internet Service Providers), this definition may overstate or understate the real number of individual USERs concerned. Certain traffic does not represent activity by a valid USER and hence must be excluded."
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Obviously A snowHead isn't a real person
Obviously A snowHead isn't a real person
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Well, the person's real but it's just a made up name, see?
Well, the person's real but it's just a made up name, see?
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Have dug up some facts on this (I'm supposed to know about this stuff, but am discovering I don't).
This paper finds that figures for unique visitors derived from IP addresses for four websites were 42%, 29%, 30% and 45% higher than estimates derived from cookies.
IP estimates were also 25%, 27%, 13% and 43% higher than figures derived from what the paper appears to believe is the best-of-breed estimate (apart from user registrations).
http://www.abcinteractiveaudits.com/news/ABCi_Unique_User_041202.doc
Of course, the most important thing is the trend. Figures going up – however derived – have to be a cause for celebration.
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You need to Login to know who's really who.
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Maybe the trend is less important than the quantity as far as sponsorship is concerned ? I guess the need to keep sponsors on board (or to attract new ones) is the main reason SCGB publish any kind of visitor figures - however derived. Good luck to them - the snow reports are still invaluable and there is other useful stuff on their web site. Shame only about the formerly open forum.
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Anyway, snowHeads is much more fun if you do.
Anyway, snowHeads is much more fun if you do.
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DavidS, actually, this is such a silly number that it always upsets me. Most sites do not track visitors by cookies, hence can never really tell one visitor from the next. What they likely mean is that they had more then 650,000 unique "sessions" from visitors. Those sessions may come from 650 visits each by 1000 people, or any other combination that multiplies out to that number. They are not looking at IP addresses (and, even if they were, the number would still mean nothing--details available on request).
In short, the only way to tell unique visitors to a site is with cookies. Even then, you are only telling unique by browser on a particular machine (using a different machine or a different browser would look like a unique users). But, that lowers the number, and most sites don't want to do that. Why be honest when you can exagerate?
This is not an SCGB issue, BTW. It is a widespread Internet lie. And one of my pet peeves. 
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You'll need to Register first of course.
You'll need to Register first of course.
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And, cookies can be deleted
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Agreed, ssh. But, as Laura says, the SCGB is counting IP addresses not visits. It has 170k unique visitors in Dec 03 (measured by IP), 423k visitor sessions (2.5 visits per visitor).
The figures I tracked down above were the first I've seen for how much IP addresses may overestimate visitors, though. Do they accord with your experience?
Last edited by After all it is free  on Thu 18-03-04 18:03; edited 1 time in total
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You'll get to see more forums and be part of the best ski club on the net.
You'll get to see more forums and be part of the best ski club on the net.
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| ssh wrote: |
| DavidS, actually, this is such a silly number that it always upsets me. |
As a potential advertiser the only thing that would interest me are 1) page impressions, 2) click thrus 3) sales
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DavidS, you have posted to snowHeads from three IPs, as has sherman-maeir. Terry Wells has posted from 7. I have posted from 2. Ian from 3, Elizabeth B wins for my quick survey--she has posted from 38! Note: these are posting numbers, not visiting numbers. Dial-in users will often post from different IPs. High-speed folks often from the same one (I have one static at home, one static NAT at the office).
Interestingly, NAT means that multiple visitors from the same NATted location will all appear as one visitor (same real IP). Depending on the site, this can counteract some of the multiple IP issues. I would suspect that sites like SCGB and snowHeads doubleplus good  are not often hit by multiple users behind a NAT.
Terry Wells, absoultely. But, that is not as common as some think.
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snowHeads are a friendly bunch.
snowHeads are a friendly bunch.
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sherman-maeir, page impressions is a typical metric, but misleading. As an example, this morning I have had about 50-75 page impressions of the main snowHeads index page. I go through there to check which forums I need to visit, and I do it very quickly. If we look there as a buyer of space on a site, I think we're missing reality. But, it is a very common metric.
Your other two are the real keys, aren't they? Who clicks and who buys.
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And love to help out and answer questions and of course, read each other's snow reports.
And love to help out and answer questions and of course, read each other's snow reports.
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ssh - are you getting the IP info from the phpBB control panel, or performing some other magic?
I've used visits in the past - because repeat visitors are often important. But would love to set up a site and compare the cookies to the logs - wld be interesting to get an idea of how much to discount the logs by...
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DavidS, from the phpBB moderation tools (for moderators, each post has an "iP" option from which I can see all of the IPs a given user has used to post). I assume this is what you mean by "the phpBB control panel," but wanted to make sure that I was clear!
With registrations, it's easy, of course...
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You know it makes sense.
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Otherwise you'll just go on seeing the one name:
Otherwise you'll just go on seeing the one name:
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It must have done.
Just a few bits of speculation, personally I'm impressed by the number of people visiting the site
The last complete figures are for November 2003, 97,000 unique visitors viewed 4.8 million pages. This is a ratio of 50:1. This would imply that the great proportion of the traffic was to the forum, at least at this time. I suspect the ratio drops in the season. Maybe more people going to the site to see the snow reports?
I'll have a guess for February 2004:
180,000 unique visitors
800,000 page views (not counting the page telling them that the ski club forum is no longer accessible)
I note their CPM rate would be more at home in the heady days of the dot com era: £25 CPM, you could do much better using google adwords. The industry seems to think around $10 CPM is more reasonable.
They should maybe change point 4 to
4. Snow Talk
The Ski Club's discussion forum was once visited regularly by skiers and boarders
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Poster: A snowHead
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ssh, u missed David Goldsmith who's posted from over 80 ip's. I have posted from close to two hundred.
I did a quick scan through and found that on average there were around 25ip's per posting-user on snowHeads which would transform 650,000 unique IP adresses into 26,000 actual people. Still a good, strong user base but a different order of magnitude I think you'll agree.
Given the point that broadband users tend to have static IP's whereas dial-up users have dynamic IP's; when U consider the very strong take up of broadband in the UK over the last year, it's perfectly arguable that the average number of IP's per user will have dropped substantially during the period over which SCGB's figures were taken leading to an even greater disparity - but that's just getting fiddley.
Cynical we may be... but also good at sums
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Obviously A snowHead isn't a real person
Obviously A snowHead isn't a real person
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who said 'There are lies, dam lies and then there are statistics!' It is all very similar to the VIth form coursework that I'm marking this week. Same practical, amazing variation in results but its all down to the interpretation!
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Well, the person's real but it's just a made up name, see?
Well, the person's real but it's just a made up name, see?
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You need to Login to know who's really who.
You need to Login to know who's really who.
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I don't follow your logic, davidof. Why would this vindicate the decision?
On a commercial level, the Ski Club's site suffers. In terms of service to members (and non-members) - which is what the site is there for - the site suffers even more.
It was a terrible decision!
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Anyway, snowHeads is much more fun if you do.
Anyway, snowHeads is much more fun if you do.
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Some caution about the Alexa chart - it's measuring ranking not traffic, and as you can see from the graph there's a lot of fluctuation. As I write, also, snowheads (74,636) ranks higher than the ski club (88,910), which seems a little unlikely.
It will be interesting to see the log files though, when the SCGB has time to post them. And I'd stick with the (cynical!) contention that 650,000 unique users is not quite what it seems, though how much lower the real figure should be is a moot point (25%? 27%? 13%? 43%? Ubrain's 96%?).
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You'll need to Register first of course.
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| David Goldsmith wrote: |
I don't follow your logic, davidof. Why would this vindicate the decision?
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Well I thought that closing the public forum would choke off visitors to the site in general but it seems that traffic has held up quite well. I'd assumed their 6 million page views per month (a high figure for this kind of site) was largely from the forum. I criticised the SCGB decision at the time but now question that as maybe refocussing on the membership is a good thing.
What I would have done is analyse important contributors to the old forum and offer them free ski club membership or some other bonus if they were already members.
Still the way the decision was actioned was very negative.
Just to point out that Alexa's figures are based on a limited set of people who have the Alexa toolsbar installed on their web browser, but lacking better information it is all I have to go on. The drop in use at the time of the forum closure seems to be reflected in the graph though.
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Many people, probably the vast majority, access the Ski Club site for snow reports, which is why the figures will still be respectable for Mar/April. But between now and December interest in that feature of the site will be negligible - hence the importance of the forum to maintain year-round traffic.
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BUt do you think forum traffic will be as high during the summer? I think it will also taper off on here. Having said that, I only discovered the Ski club forum in the run up to the season - around october, I think, if not later - so I can;t say how busy it was over the summer
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You'll get to see more forums and be part of the best ski club on the net.
You'll get to see more forums and be part of the best ski club on the net.
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Inevitably things do tail off. Last summer on the SC forum, there was still a good core of people that kept things lively/amusing however. From what I do remember, though, as the new (this) season approached, the contributions soared to well beyond those during the former season. I suppose the chatter just grew as more and more people turned their attention/excitement to ski=ing, and the news of the forum filtered out to more people.
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| David Goldsmith wrote: |
Many people, probably the vast majority, access the Ski Club site for snow reports
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I guess that must be what they were looking at.
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| hence the importance of the forum to maintain year-round traffic. |
My only experience is the newsgroup rec.skiing.resorts.europe where the traffic from May to October is very low. The snowboard forums maintain some traffic as there is more interest in using snowparks on glaciers than there is skiing.
Of course with everyone easyjetting off to Chile and Australia these days for summer skiing maybe things will be different.
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FAQ
