Posted by: Pete Horadan
So we’ve been making the point all along that Demand Rating™ provides a new lens on subscriber loyalty. Realistically though, the usefulness of behavioral analytics or web analytics are gated by accuracy. So how do you get accurate online metrics? What’s really knowable?
Let’s start with usage tracking. The traditional approach is through the use of tracking cookies. A cookie is a small piece of data that is stored on a device by the application. Each new browser that accesses an application is given a cookie, and the application relies on that cookie to track user behavior. The issue, of course, is that the cookie method of tracking is wildly inaccurate, and it’s simple to see why.
At the highest level, tracking based on cookies don’t track individuals at all—they track cookies. Users access applications through a variety of browsers and machines—from the office, at home, from their mobile devices. Cookies can and are often reset by the user or even automatically by the browser whenever it shuts down. It is practically never true that an individual visitor will utilize a single cookied browser for access.
In fact a recent study at Penn State shows that “cookies are about just as inaccurate in estimating unique visitors as unique network addresses,” overestimating audience size by 7 -30 times! So, do you really want to know that 90 cookies accessed your application? Or that three people did? The whole flawed cookie process results in a huge overstatement of usage and a total inability to track actual people.
In a future article, I’ll talk about a better approach that avoids these problems.
