Hello

I'd like to get advice on any useful benchmarks a site can monitor, which does not have cookies in use.

I know these doesn't leave many options, but what would be the best to choose, number of hits or number of registrations over a period of time..?

thanks

Lucy

thanks Alex.

the company involved don't want to use cookies, their legal department is concerned about privacy issues!

On 17:02:26 19 May 2004 Alex Chudnovsky wrote:
>>I know these doesn't leave many options, but what
>would be
>>the best to choose, number of hits or number of
>>registrations over a period of time..?
>
>I'd recommend to avoid using hits (this is not just page
>but also every image on a page) completely for anything
>but low level technical analysis for the purpose of
>bandwidth counting and some other things.
>
>Number of "unique visitors" (based on IP
>addresses which is not ideal) can still be calculated and
>so long as have critical mass of people it might just be
>okay-ish - at least for B2C sites.
>
>I'd use number of registration for the purpose of
>conversion calculation - this assumes that primary
>objective of the site in question is to get people
>registered.
>
>To wrap it up - I am amazed that for some reason it is not
>possible to get cookies working - it is really a trivial
>technical task to get at least a session cookie
>operational and logged.

Yes, go ahead and calculate visitors using IP/Browser if you don't mind if the figures are wrong by a factor of 7 times or more! We tested just how accurate IP based figures were and that's what we found over a monthly period. Session based figures (visits, paths, marketing roi analysis, page time etc) were also pretty well useless from a marketing perspective, with errors in the 3 times range. We produced a full report into our findings, which you can get by registering on our site. A summary of the report can be found at www.redeye.com/case_data.html. In essence the only numbers that you can get from your log files will be page impressions and even they could be significantly out if you have a static site (due to page caching). What you should measure depends on the site objectives, I’d thoroughly recommend going to Jim Sterne’s workshop on Monday if you’re in the process of setting up an analytics framework (see emetrics.org). Our findings were that IP/Browser based results were more likely to be wrong than right and in the absence of cookie or log-in based data then the only numbers worth looking at are from other back end systems such as unique log-ins, registrations, brochure requests / downloads and sales data.

You could try ip2location or countrycheck.com. They give you detailed information as to where you visitors are coming from.

On 11:59:14 20 May 2004 Alex Chudnovsky wrote:
>> Our findings were that IP/Browser based results were
>more
>> likely to be wrong than right and in the absence of
>cookie or
>> log-in based data then the only numbers worth looking
>at are
>> from other back end systems such as unique log-ins,
>> registrations, brochure requests / downloads and
>sales data.
>
>The number you suggest to look at are "actions"
>that can and should be used to calculate conversions,
>however before you do that you still need to put at least
>an estimate on traffic.
>
>IPs are far from ideal, but in this situation however we
>specifically do not have cookies, and I think its far
>better to have a grasp of traffic levels using
>not-so-accurate IPs than completely ignore that data and
>focus only on end results.
>
>There is no single fool proof method of counting number of
>genuine visits or unique visitors - all methods are not
>ideal and they differ by (possibly variable from case to
>case) effectiveness.