Month: November 2006

There have been several articles around getting your site ranked in search engines and a whole economy has developed around SEO. While this is critical in getting users to your site, the advertising value of your site is also tied to its relative position with competitors. Calculating your competitive positions is difficult at best and in most cases the only the solution are third-party measurement companies. In the US there are a variety of third-party measurement sources but in Canada the leading provider is comScore.

For those not familiar with third-party measurement services, they measure a sample of internet users and create an estimated traffic report based on the sample’s behaviour. The sample of internet users is normally in the form of a group of users who volunteer to run tracking software on their computer. With a large enough panel these estimates are generally considered accurate enough to rank competitive sites and provide a good indication of relative value between sites.

The nature of websites makes automatically tracking users web browsing somewhat complicated, especially when web sites share links across multiple domains. Its easier for the tracking software to ignore links to certain file types such as images or movie files. It’s more complicated when it comes to frames since the tracking software doesn’t know the details of the frame. The whole website could be contained within the frame link so it can’t easily be ignored. As a result when a site with a frame link is loaded it will normally create a separate user visit for the frame linked domain.

For example a user visiting www.domain.com that loads a linked image from www.differentdomain.com would not trigger a visit for the differentdomain.com. However this seems this is different with frames. If the users visits www.domain.com and loads a frame linked from www.differentdomain.com, the tracking software normally tracks this as a separate visit to www.differentdomain.com.