Case in point: Why does different software come up with such different numbers when it comes to counting the number of hits or visits a web page receives?

The answers may surprise you. There are a number of ways that advertisers measure the efficiency of their campaigns. Traditionally, the most important one has always been the number of opportunities to contact the customer. In internet language, we are talking about the number of visitors, the number of times a page is viewed, or the number of times a particular domain has been visited.

Advertisers compare traffic data obtained from website traffic reports and check them against independent data provided by Nielsen/NetRatings Inc. or comScore, which record web surfers’ mouse clicks. After comparing these two, there seems to be a major cause for concern. The numbers almost never coincide. One of the reasons comScore points out is that many websites count “pop-up adsâ€? as actual views of a page. comScore filters these out, so they are not included as actual page views.

There are other sites such as Meebo Inc. that are actually filtering their data to be more reliable, but less popular. If you click on the Meebo log-in, it will bring you to the log-in section without bringing you to a different page. Page views are always counted as only one the entire time a user is at the site. So now they have to resort to another statistic: the amount of time each user spends at their site, in order to attract advertisers.

So the problem comes in when sites like Meebo try to offer space on their website to advertisers. The opposite is true of web giants like MySpace, YouTube, Google and Yahoo! that seem to be doubling and tripling their hits on a monthly basis, but are actually manipulated to look more popular. So who can you trust? The short answer is nobody.

The old traditional gauge of numbers of clicks, gave way to number of page views, and now, numbers of pages requested. This is a step in the right direction, but still leaves a lot to be desired. For instance, RSS technology or Really Simple Syndication allows users to subscribe to news alerts or mass newsletters. But every time they are sent out, none of them are recorded as a page view. A similar problem occurs with the installation of widgets, which allow you to directly contact or instant message a website, but those visits will never show up in the figures either.

The new business of web metrics is becoming more and more profitable, as so-called “click fraud� is on the rise. New companies which attempt to measure the amount of web traffic persistently try to artificially inflate the number of visits received to their website; thus, attracting more potential advertisers.

The time has come for data analysts to work together and devise a transparent business standard which will enable experts to compare statistics uniformly and reflect the popularity of websites in a more accurate and precise way.

People visit websites every day. But what is a ‘visit’ exactly? Analysts use different methods to count visits.

This is confusing. Precise statistics need common methods.