Internet Metrics and Web Analytics
Web analytics can help companies measure the results of traditional print or broadcast advertising campaigns. It helps one to estimate how traffic to a website changes after the launch of a new campaign. Web analytics and Internet metrics provide information about the number of visitors to a website and the number of page views. It helps gauge traffic and popularity trends which is useful within a market. We have recently changed vendors that supply our internet metrics. You may have noticed some of the names for the values also have changed. Here is a quick overview of some of the metrics that may show up in place of the ones below. The web metrics from Compete and based on a “per month” calculation. The 13 month’s calculations are summed then divided by the 13. There is a new base metric each month. Since only the owner of a particular website can see actual and real-time statistics of the traffic to that website, yet some statistics are measured by third-party companies such as Compete, Alexa, ComScore.
1. Word Count = the number of words in an article. This is used in conjunction with other metrics to estimate the Ad Value.
2. In Links = the number of links that are directly pointed back to that particular article or web page.
3. Page Views = The average monthly number of times a page has been loaded from a domain for the past 13 months.
4. Rank = The monthly average numerical ranking of the website, by total number of unique visitors, relative to other measured websites for the past 13 months.
5. Attention = The percent of total minutes spent on a specific website by all US users on the Internet that were spent on this domain for the past 13 months.
6. Average Stay = The average number of seconds that all unique visitors stayed on a specific website for the past 13 months. This is also known as the average visit time per person.
7. Unique Visitors = The monthly average number of unique people who visited a domain within the past 13 months. This is also known as the Estimated Audience.
8. Estimated Ad Value = Estimated Ad Value for Web Content is proprietary to Magnolia Clipping & Broadcast Monitoring Service and is based on Page Views – Number of Words in the article and the CPM rate (Cost Per Thousand people who viewed this page).
9. Calculated Publicity Value =The Estimated Ad Value multiplied by a publicity fact of 5. This takes the Calculated Ad Equivalency and multiplies it by 5. Since the “value” of having a story appear on a news website is much higher than the value of placing an ad, the industry standard is to say that story is actually 5 times more valuable, so we’ve used 5 as the multiplier for the Calculated Publicity Value.
PREVIOUS VERSION AND DEFINITIONS LISTED BELOW.
INTERNET METRICS
We have recently changed vendors that supply our internet metrics. You may have noticed some of the names for the values also have changed. Here is a quick overview of some of the metrics that may show up in place of the ones below.
Rank = The ranking of the domain by a total number of unique visitors within the past 13 months.
Unique Visitors = The number of unique people who visited a domain within the past 13 months.
Visits = The number of separate visits made to a domain by all unique visitors within the past 13 months.
Page Views = The number of times a page has been loaded from a domain within the past 13 months.
Average Stay = The average number of seconds that a visit lasts within the past 13 months.
Visits per Person = The average number of times each unique visitor visits the domain within the past 13 months
Pages per Visit = The average number of pages displayed during a visit within the past 13 months.
Attention = The percent of total minutes spent by all US users on the Internet that were spent on this domain within the past 13 months.
Reach (Daily) = The percent of all US users on the Internet that had at least one visit to this domain by day 365 days
Attention (Daily) = The percent of total minutes spent by all US users on the Internet that were spent on this domain within the past 13 months.

About the Traffic Rankings
A listing of all sites on the Web, sorted by traffic… Magnolia computes traffic rankings by analyzing the Web usage of millions of Alexa Toolbar users. The information is sorted, sifted, anonymized, counted, and computed, until, finally, we get the traffic rankings shown in the Alexa service. The process is relatively complex, but if you have a need to know, please read on.
What is Traffic Rank?
The traffic rank is based on three months of aggregated historical traffic data from millions of Alexa Toolbar users and is a combined measure of page views and users (reach). As a first step, Alexa computes the reach and number of page views for all sites on the Web on a daily basis. The main Alexa traffic rank is based on the geometric mean of these two quantities averaged over time (so that the rank of a site reflects both the number of users who visit that site as well as the number of pages on the site viewed by those users). The three-month change is determined by comparing the site’s current rank with its rank from three months ago. For example, on July 1, the three-month change would show the difference between the rank based on traffic during the first quarter of the year and the rank based on traffic during the second quarter.
What are sites and Web hosts?
Traffic is computed for sites, which are typically defined at the domain level. For example, the Web hosts www.msn.com, carpoint.msn.com and slate.msn.com are all treated as part of the same site, because they all reside on the same domain, msn.com. An exception is personal home pages, which are treated separately if they can be automatically identified as such from the URLs in question. Also, sites which are found to be serving the “same” content are generally counted together as the same site.
What is Reach?
Reach measures the number of users. Reach is typically expressed as the percentage of all Internet users who visit a given site. So, for example, if a site like yahoo.com has a reach of 28%, this means that if you took random samples of one million Internet users, you would on average find that 280,000 of them visit yahoo.com. Alexa expresses reach as a number of users per million. Alexa’s one-week and three-month average reach are measures of daily reach, averaged over the specified time period. The reach rank is a ranking of all sites based solely on their reach. The three-month changes are determined by comparing a site’s current reach and reach rank with its values from three months ago.
What are Page Views?
Page views measure the number of pages viewed by Alexa Toolbar users. Multiple page views of the same page made by the same user on the same day are counted only once. The page views per user numbers are the average numbers of unique pages viewed per user per day by the users visiting the site. The page view rank is a ranking of all sites based solely on the total number of page views (not page views per user). The three-month changes are determined by comparing a site’s current page view numbers with those from three months ago.
Page views per million metrics indicate what fraction of all the page views by toolbar users go toa particular site. For example, if yahoo.com has 70,000 page views per million, this means that 7% of all page views go to yahoo.com. If you summed the fractional page views over all sites, you would get 100% (this is not true of reach, since each user can, of course, visit more than one site).
How Are Traffic Trend Graphs Calculated?
The Trend graph shows you a three-day moving average of the site’s daily traffic rank, charted over time. The daily traffic rank reflects the traffic to the site based on data for a single day. In contrast, the main traffic rank shown in the Alexa Toolbar and elsewhere in the service is calculated from three months of aggregated traffic data. Daily traffic rankings will sometimes benefit sites with sporadically high traffic, while the three-month traffic ranking benefits sites with consistent traffic over time. Since we feel that consistent traffic is a better indication of a site’s value, we’ve chosen to use the three month traffic rank to represent the site’s overall popularity. We use the daily traffic rank in the Trend graphs because it allows you to see short-term fluctuations in traffic much more clearly.
It is possible for a site’s three-month traffic rank to be higher than any single daily rank shown in the Trend graph. On any given day there may be many sites that temporarily shoot up in the rankings. But if a site has consistent traffic performance, it may end up with the best ranking when the traffic data are aggregated into the three-month average.
A good analogy is a four-day golf tournament: if a different player comes in first at each match, but you come in second at all four matches, you can end up winning the tournament.
How are Movers & Shakers Calculated?
The movers and shakers list is based on changes in average reach (numbers of users). For each site on the net, we compute the average weekly reach and compare it with the average reach during previous weeks. The more significant the change, the higher the site will be on the list. The percent change shown on the Movers & Shakers list is based on the change in reach. It is important to note that the traffic rankings shown on the Movers & Shakers page are weekly traffic rankings; they are not the same as the three-month average traffic rankings shown in the other Alexa services and are not the same as the reach numbers used to generate the list.
Some Important Disclaimers
The traffic data are based on the set of Alexa users, which may not be a representative sample of the global Internet population. Known biases include (but are likely not limited to) the following:
• Our users are disproportionately likely to visit alexa.com, amazon.com and archive.org, and traffic to these sites may be substantially overcounted.
• The Alexa Toolbar works only with the Internet Explorer browser. Sites frequented mainly by users of other browsers will be undercounted. For example, AOL/Netscape browser is not supported, which means that Alexa collects little data from AOL users, and our traffic to aol.com is likely lower than it would be for a more representative sample.
• The Alexa Toolbar works only on Windows operating systems. Although a large majority of the Internet population currently used Windows, traffic to any sites which are disproportionately visited by users of other operating systems will be undercounted.
• The rate of adoption of Alexa software in different parts of the world may vary widely due to advertising locality, language, and other geographic and cultural factors. For example, to some extent the prominence of Korean sites among our top-ranked sites reflects known high rates of general Internet usage in SouthKorea, but there may also be a disproportionate number of Korean Alexa users.
• In some cases, traffic data may also be adversely affected by our “site” definitions. With tens of millions of hosts on the Internet, our automated procedures for determining which hosts are serving the “same” content may be incorrect and/or out-of-date. Similarly, the determinations of domains and home pages may not always be accurate. When these determinations change (as they do periodically),there may be sudden artificial changes in the Alexa traffic rankings for some sites as a consequence.
• The Alexa Toolbar turns itself off on secure pages (https:). Sites with secure page views will be under-represented in the Alexa traffic data.
In addition to the biases above, the Alexa user base is only a sample of the Internet population, and sites with relatively low traffic will not be accurately ranked by Alexa due to the statistical limitations of the sample. Alexa’s data come from a large sample of several million Alexa Toolbar users; however, this is not large enough to accurately determine the rankings of sites with fewer than roughly 1,000 total monthly visitors.
Generally, Traffic Rankings of 100,000+ should be regarded as not reliable because the amount of data we receive is not statistically significant. Conversely, the more traffic a site receives (the closer it gets to the number 1 position), the more reliable its Traffic Ranking becomes.

Magnolia Clipping and Broadcast Monitoring Portal Definitions

Broadcast Metrics
Nielsen Radio Audience Estimate:
Nielsen Audio (formerly Arbitron) audience numbers for local radio stations. The numbers come from Nielsen Audio’s annual Spring ratings sweep and are used for one year (approximately Summer to Summer).

Nielsen Television Audience Estimate: Local Nielsen data for all sweep periods. Some markets are updated by Nielsen monthly, some are updated four times per year. The Nielsen numbers available through the Magnolia Clipping and Broadcast Monitoring Portal are for adults ages 18+. Data is distributed by Nielsen anywhere between 2 to 6 weeks after a ratings period ends. Magnolia Clipping and Broadcast Monitoring loads Nielsen numbers within a week or two of receiving them from Nielsen. Nielsen numbers are applied to the ratings period for which the numbers were gathered. Those numbers will be applied from that period through the present and will remain in effect until the next ratings are received for that market. National audience estimates are collected weekly every week of the year and are provided to Magnolia Clipping and Broadcast Monitoring approximately 2 weeks after they are collected. As with the local numbers, the numbers for any given week are applied to that week through the present. This means that the numbers you see for last night’s national programming, for example, are actually the numbers that were provided for the most recent period (generally 2-3 weeks ago).

TV & Radio Ad and Publicity Values: Magnolia Clipping and Broadcast Monitoring uses a media buyer to gather the 30-second Ad Values for news programming on local and national stations uploaded to Magnolia Clipping and Broadcast Monitoring. The “Calculated Ad Equivalency” uses the 30-second ad value multiplied by the detected length of the story. If no runtime is available, the system will show the Calculated Ad Equivalency by using a default length of 1 minute, however, no runtime will be displayed. Since the “Calculated Publicity Value” of having a news story appear during a broadcast is promoted as being much higher than the value of placing an ad, the industry standard is to say that story is actually 3 times more valuable. This takes the Calculated Ad Equivalency and multiplies it by 3.


Portal-Specific Fields:
Tone:
A user-defined field used to denote the tone of the story – as Positive, Somewhat Positive, Neutral, Somewhat Negative or Negative. This is assigned manually by the portal user.

Placement:
Placement is the position of a story within a broadcast, and is automatically calculated based on the timestamp of the story hit. The first third of a newscast is marked as the “Beginning,” the middle third as “Middle,” and the last third of a broadcast program is marked as “End.”

Prominence: Prominence is a user-defined field to denote the ‘weight’ or prominence the station put on a particular story. For example, “Mention” may denote stories where a client or keyword is only mentioned. “Feature” is typically used to denote longer stories, or stories which convey more details or message points about the associated topic. “Focus” is generally used to describe a story which goes in-depth into the associated topic with greater detail, message points, and may include longer soundbytes/interviews.

Message Points / Notes: A field where portal user can include any free-form text to be saved with the portal story record.

Internet Metrics (compiled from Alexa and Comscore)

Unique Visitors is the estimated number of unique computers that viewed at least one page on this domain in the month. The metric counts computers that connect to a site, not the number of different people who may use that computer.

Average Stay is the estimated average number of seconds visitors to this site stay on this site.

Attention will show as 0.00; it is a discontinued metric.

Rank is the estimate of a domain’s rank among all domains, based on page views. Rank 1 would be the domain with the highest number of page views in the month.

Page Views is the estimated number of pages from this domain viewed in the month.

Word Count is the actual count of words in the article.

CPM is the cost per thousand Page Views and is used to determine Estimated Ad Value. This number is an average of CPM values calculated by NDS from a number of data sources, approximately $11 for local websites and approximately $20 for national or international websites.

Estimated Ad Value is the estimated advertising value for pages on this domain, based on page views and CPM.

Calc Publicity Value is the estimated publicity value for pages on this domain. It is a multiple of Estimated Ad Value chosen by the Affiliate. The default multiplier is 3.

Internet Results with Limited or No Metrics: If a website article shows limited metrics, typically ‘InLinks’ and ‘Word Count,’ then we do not have SimilarWeb metrics for the site and are defaulting to Alexa metrics collected at the time the article was entered. Alternately, if an Excel file or other reports shows the Ratings Estimate Type as ‘W,’ those are also based on Alexa numbers. In some cases no metrics will display at all. If you need assistance investigating an absence of web metrics, you may submit a Support Ticket with specific, relevant information.