Warm Coffee - Reflections of a Web Developer

I received an email the other day from a colleague asking the following:

“I was surfing for info on Unique Users and came across this - I’d really appreciate your views on it if you’ve got time to have a look. Do you know anything about this company and would it be worth getting involved with them?”

http://www.thinkmetrics.com/New-methods-of-web-analysis.ph

I read the article, and suggest you do to. Hmmm.. sounds like a miracle cure, doesn’t it?

After four years supporting the WebTrends web log analysis software in the 1990’s, I’m used to the limitations of log and cookie based analysis, and there are several assumptions in the method described in this article that I would take issue with…

“1. If the same cookie is present on multiple visits, it?s the same person.”

Not true - it’s the same browser / computer, but not necessarily the same person. Take a public library computer: hundreds of people could use that - it’s most likely that on a popular site with no authentication, that a cookie is set once, which would then be used by anyone using that computer.

“4. We know some IP addresses cannot be shared by one person. These are the ones that would require a person to move faster than possible. If we have one IP address in New York, then one in Tokyo 60 minutes later, we know it can?t be the same person because you can?t get from New York to Tokyo in one hour. ”

Not true - IP addresses can be set by a remote data centre / proxy depending on your ISP. The user doesn’t physically have to be in those places, it just depends on how their traffic is routed. The ‘AOL problem’ (many IP addresses designated during any one session) applies here too. Whoever wrote this, doesn’t seem to understand network topography, which I would suggest is fairly useful when talking about Internet user measurements.

Its also states that “30-50% of people delete cookies”…. and then proposes a whole system based on persistent cookies. It’s no good using a range if the range drops by 30-50% in the first place, even if you weight this. Again, a flawed concept.

But I think the most telling ‘wouldn’t touch with a bargepole’ comment in the article would be:

“We’ve approached some household names in metrics, online advertising delivery, and major search engines. The response has been zilch. No one wants to know.”

If online ad agencies and other metrics companies aren’t interested, you must be flogging a dead horse.

To be honest, if you read this without focussing on the techie bits it’s a simple sales pitch for a dodgy scheme.

So the summary answer I gave to the emailed query was “I’ve not heard of this company, I’d not heard of this ‘research’, and I would suggest our time could possibly be better spent.”

On a similar note, an article on the BBC site - Web counting tools ‘need change’ - makes interesting reading, although again, offers no real solutions. I’d be very interested to know if anyone has come across any other methods of measuring users on Web sites.

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This is a neat trick which allows you to create ‘active’ bookmarks which provide functionality without having to initially visit the site in question first. By creating a bookmark with an associated keyword, you can run searches on target sites from the Firefox address bar.

Example: The Oxford English Dictionary

To get the relevant query string, go to www.oed.com, and run a search. You will then be presented with the completed query string for running a search on this site, eg:

http://dictionary.oed.com/cgi/findword?query_type=word&queryword=test&find.x=16&find.y=22&find=Find+word

We want to make this dynamic, so need to replace the test string with a string variable. In this case, the relevant form element is ‘queryword’, so we can take this URL with its query string, and create a bookmark from it.

In Firefox, create a new bookmark - call it OED Search, or whatever you like. In the location box, add the following:

http://dictionary.oed.com/cgi/findword?query_type=word&queryword=%s

You can strip the rest of the query string, this is just cruft. Add a keyword, say ‘oed’ (this should be unique, so make it fairly obvious yet distinct). Save your bookmark.

Now, in your Firefox address bar, you can type something like ‘oed floccinaucinihilipilification’ and your browser should then integrate this into your bookmark location string, run the search, and return you a page of results as normal.

Obviously this can be done with any site which runs a search through a query string. Some sites obfuscate the search page in the results, so you will need to take the relevant form values from the initial form, rather than a completed query string, but the principle is the same.

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