Inaccurate site counter "kills businesses"

AN ONLINE magazine is complaining that it is losing out on advertising because one of the major 'web counters' is under reporting the number of visitors the site gets.

Digital Home dumped its server logs last year because advertising agencies said they were not independent. They started to use a web analytics package from Google which tracks every page request received by the site.

Google Analytics reported Digital Home served up over 2.7 million page views in January to almost 250,000 unique visitors. However one of Canada's largest advertising agencies rejected the magazine as a potential target because another web tracking company, Comscore claimed the outfit had 32,000 visitors.

When the magazine investigated, it discovered that Comscore had all sorts of inaccuracies. The outfit claimed that Digital Home began on September 2005, when in fact, our site was launched in December of 2001.

Comscore told the hacks that its "panel methodologies reflect the investment of millions of dollars and years of research and development".

But Digital Home is worried that advertisers will stay away in droves.

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