Wednesday, August 26, 2009

Nielsen not good enough

For as long as I have known, I have used Nielsen as a tool to measure a website's traffic. Now with today's revelation that Nielsen's sample size numbers have increased from 3,500 to 7,000 it seems more clear than ever just how inaccurate the tracking of Australian uniques has been.

With the increase in the size of the panel all of a sudden Google's unique audience has grown by 16% to 12.4 million and Ninemsn has grown by 27% to 9.7 million visitors per month. Imagine the increase in traffic numbers if, god forbid, the sample size of Australian internet market was 20 million people?

All throughout the industry the data from Nielsen is taken with a grain of salt but we have no other way of measurement? Now I am no back end specialist, but surely being the greatest search engine in the world Google can provide a greater insight on unique visitors? This is the same company that has provided Google Maps, Google Docs and SEM!

Have we not reached a stage in the industry where we can demand greater accuracy of data?

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