Number crunching
I have been casting about the interweb, to find out some of what I should already know (don’t tell anyone). Things like the difference between a unique user, a page impression (I knew that one) and a visit.
My WordPress blog stats plugin tells me how many visits my site gets a day - but this isn’t the language of the rest of the online world, where everyone’s gibbering about unique users and page impressions. Of course I want to talk like any bona fide online publisher and trade in the same electronic currency of unique users etc.
To put it all into context, lets look at what the mega busy websites are getting, according to ABCe, the media industry body which audits traffic to registered websites. The Guardian, website of the year in the British Press Awards in April, had a stonking 26m (25.98m) unique users in October. What surprised me is that the Telegraph wasn’t that far behind, with 23.2m unique users in the same month. The Times got 20.5m unique users in October. I always thought the Guardian was the out and out leader of newspaper websites. Now I see the competition is fiercer than I imagined.
Naturally, my own little toe in the blogosphere cannot come even close to the millions (ha!) that these newspaper websites get. No, instead I have Incentives & Meetings International and its 3,188 unique users in March in my sights. The fight is on but already I’ve got a better title.
