We've made some important recent changes which may affect you, so please read on...
The Internet is a constantly changing medium. What's available, how to find things, how to measure activities and results - they are all changing, almost daily.
Over the years, the gathering and analysis of key stastics has become more complex. What was easy to manage last year might not be so easy this year. The validity and meaning of some statistics is constantly changing.
In the early days, everyone talked about "hits". Nowadays no-one but the unsophisticated user refers to them any more - "hits" are a largely meaningless statistic.
At Aspermont, we are constantly changing and "tweaking" the gathering and displaying of statistics, to ensure that the quality and value of these statistics are the best we can achieve for our clients.
Recently we've completed a major overhaul of our procedures, primarily with the issue of "clicks" (or "clickthroughs").
Click Tracking
In simple terms, a "click" is registered when someone clicks on an image, typically an advertisement. Obviously, the more clicks an advert collects, the better that is for an advertiser. The problem is that many of the clicks which are registered are of no use to the advertiser. Two major sources of "useless" clicks are:
- Spiders and Bots
- People who are clearly not potential customers - for instance, Aspermont Staff
Spiders and Bots
In order for a website to have its pages recognised and catalogued by the major search engines, the engines send out "spiders" (also known as "bots"). These roam around the internet, searching for new pages. When they find a page, they follow all of the links on the page, just to see where they go to.
The problem for an advertiser is that when a spider uses their advert to head off to another page, that counts as a "click". And that's what we don't want! Furthermore, on a site like MiningNews.net, with constantly changing content, the spiders return more and more frequently, and this just compounds the problem!
Hence, one of the major changes we have made is to (wherever possible) exclude these spider-generated clicks from the totals.
Non-Customers
As I said, you really don't want clicks from non-customers to count. One source we can readily identify is our own staff at Aspermont. At the very minimum, advertising sales staff and graphic designers will have a need to click on adverts, and so we have also excluded these from the overall totals.
What does that mean to you, the advertiser?
First of all, you will notice that your click numbers will appear to have fallen - after all, we've stripped out many of the clicks from your totals.
However, here's the issue - the clicks we've excluded were no use to you anyway - they weren't potential customers! So, all other things being equal, your true, useful traffic will remain unchanged.
In essence, clicks are great, but only if they come from the right people - All others are a waste of time!
Many other sites don't bother with this kind of issue. They are simply happy to lump everything together, promise advertisers huge clicks and traffic and go about their business in that manner.
At Aspermont, we won't do business that way. We'll continue to monitor what we do, tweak systems wherever necessary, to make sure that we give you the best meaningful results possible.
Remember, he who has the largest amount of meaningful traffic, wins.
Feel free to talk to your advertising representative if you would like more information.
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