Manson in Jelly Fish!
Check out Marilyn Manson talking about Lindsey Lohan in this weeks Jelly Fish…
http://natmags.cerosmedia.com/1T467be345aad1f012.cde/page/28
Lies, damn lies and not so Unique Users…
Recently, while working on Ceros, I’ve had to become very involved with the auditing process of web sites - everything from how statistical data is recorded, the ways to measure it and the vocabulary used in describing the results. While it may seem obvious, there are very strict rules and regulations about what you can and can’t do… the reason for this is because these numbers are the life blood of the commercial web - after all, if no one’s looking at your site, why bother?
In the UK if you want a third party certificate for the statistics of your web site then the minimum mandatory metric you have to declare is your total Unique Users for the period being audited. But this metric is under increasing scrutiny by the industry as many consider it unreliable and misleading.
The metric is misleading because the best it can actually measure is unique web browsers. Most sites use cookies to ‘tag’ browsers as being unique, but this is no indication of how many Users that browser has or conversely if those Users have multiple browsers (IE and Fire Fox) or multiple devices (Desktop PC and Mobile Device).
Interestingly it’s ‘illegal’ to rely on cookies alone to measure Unique Users, which is why a lot of tools like Google Analytics are un-auditable. The non cookie based approach to counting Unique Users is to concatenate the device’s IP Address and User Agent to form a unique id, this is something sites must fall back on for Users who reject cookies. This is because users who set their browsers to reject cookies will appear to be a different Unique User every time they make a request to a site that relies on cookies alone, which will obviously over state the statistics (both Bounce Rate and Unique Users).
The biggest problem with the Unique User metric though has been widely reported and it’s a group of people who have been christened Serial Resetters.
Who are they? They’re a group of users who for what ever reason (mostly concerns about privacy) delete all their cookies on a regular basis which, for analytical purposes, is worse than people who out right reject cookies because they can’t be detected and catered for with User Agent/IP address. But there’s an increasing problem with even that…
Microsoft, in their infinite wisdom, have allowed plug-ins and add-ons to show up in Internet Explore’s User Agent. Which would be fine but people like to fiddle with things which means of the course of an audit period it is entirely possible for a browser’s User Agent to change as well as any cookies installed! Which means that even ignoring the problems counting cookied users there is still potential for the Unique Users of a site to be overstated!
So, what is to be done? Either we’ve all got to except a permanent unique identifier in our browsers (which isn’t going to happen) or the industry has to put more emphasis on session based metrics like Visits or Page Impressions.
Knock Off Nigel
Last night I went to the cinema to see Oceans $i++ (review to come, probably) and saw the below charming little ad that is presumably designed to bring social pressure to bare on people who buy and therefore fund DVD piracy.
I guess this is better than accusing all movie goers of being thieves, but I couldn’t help thinking it was still a bit childish! I’m sure there are larger social issues that should be being discussed here… like begging (which, let’s face it is what selling pirate DVDs amounts to, imho) but it’s a bit late and I want to read my book before I go to sleep!
Ceros and Monkey Mag on C|Net!
(near the end)
Nike+ Running Shoes (divide by pain)
Following Rob’s lead I got a Nike+ and some shoes to put it in this weekend. I took it for an eight hundred meter jog this evening and am still feeling the pain now! It’s been years since I got any formal exercise:
The trainers are really good, after wearing skater’s trainers for seven years it felt like I was running around in socks! The only thing that spoilt the experience was the surly treatment I got in the Nike store. The people working in the shop really didn’t want to help me… or even bother trying to pretend that they might. So I went to John Lewis instead - where the shoes were cheaper and the service much better. I’d strongly recommend any one else to do the same.
The device itself does exactly what it says on the tin and for £19.99 I can’t complain at all (well except about the service in the Nike store…)