Why are websites being accused of falsely inflating visitor figures

A. Various web monitoring organisations, including ABC Electric and The Internet Advertising Bureau, have called for stricter rules governing the audit of visitor figures after many websites have been caught falsely inflating visitor numbers, in an attempt to mislead advertisers. Many of the companies accused were found counting false visitors such as software and search engine 'robots',, employee hits and other non-customer visits as viable hits, in a calculated effort to boost figures.

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Q.� Why do many Internet companies continue to falsely boost visitor figures

A.� With the current slowdown in web advertising, Internet companies are increasingly battling amongst themselves for the limited number of advertisers still placing ads on the net. As most advertisers judge the success of a website by the number of hits it receives, many web managers are taking unscrupulous steps to boost their site's hit rate and visitor figures. In addition, many advertisers pay by webpage impressions and click-through deals, whereby one site will pay another for the number of visitors it generates. Research into such advertising deals has shown that up to 30% of hits on�websites are not potential customers at all.

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Q.� Have any websites been penalised for falsifying hit rates

A.� Most recently the high profile Internet company, E-district.net, lost its chief executive after he was fired for allegedly inflating web visitor numbers. The AIM-listed Company is accused of falsifying figures for registered users. The site's statistics dropped from 150 million page impressions in May 2000 to less than 9 million only a month later. A spokesperson for E-district said: 'The reasons for this sharp decline are still being investigated.'

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Q.� What's the difference between a hit, a click, and a pageview

A.� Understanding the difference between these terms is vital for understanding how website popularity is measured. For example, advertisers are not longer satisfied by websites with high hit rates.

• Hits, though these continue to be the measurement of choice for many websites, they actually tell very little about the effectiveness or the popularity of sites. The main reason is that the term 'hit' refers to a request from a browser for a page and image on the website, therefore if the opening page contains three images, the site will receive four 'hits' every time someone loads the page. Another drawback to counting hits is that if the web owner clicks onto the page several times, the hit-counting system will interpret this as series of separate visits, from different users.
• A clickthrough is the number of clicks or responses received by an online ad. This is more reliable than hits measuring the popularity of a site or the effectiveness of its advertising, however, clickthroughs do not necessarily guarantee sales.
• Pageviews, on the hand, are similar to hits in that they refer to the number of files requested from the website' server, but are not limited to the web pages themselves. While a little more concrete than hits, pageviews do not give specific information about surfers or their behaviour.

Q.� So, what's the most accurate to calculate visitor numbers

A.� The best way to get an accurate estimate of a website's visitor numbers is to count its unique users. Unique users are tracked not according to the files they have requested, but by their unique IP (Internet Protocol) address, which is specific to every user and computer. This form of measurement will identify when one user clicks onto a site several times from the same computer, thus preventing website owners from counting repeat clicks from their own employees as evidence of high visitor numbers.

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By Christina Okoli