We humbly suggest that other media houses check their facts before calling us liars.
A news provider has an obligation to be accurate, so that the public doesn’t feel duped.
To date we have not had any enquiry from Cayman Net News requesting confirmation of our website statistics.
Our website statistics are indeed accurate, down to the last digit. Thanks to a solid statistical programme and the ability to operate it, we can report and advertise, if we so choose, what our website hits are in any given period.
The images accompanying this editorial are snapshots taken directly from our statistical programme, ‘independently recorded and reported’ (Cayman Free Press Staff) for our advertisers to see. Indeed we do report our statistics, each and every month. The stats shown here were reproduced September 19, for the July period in 2006 and 2007.
So let’s take a hard look at the results and educate ourselves on what they really mean.
A hit, in fact, is the smallest measurable unit in the realm of web statistics, but is also of least relevance and is often confused with web traffic. A hit is any request by a browser, for any bit of our web pages.
For example, on today’s caycompass.com front page we have 40 images and files to load onto the page so everything can be seen. When our loyal web visitors stop by for a look at today’s news, they’ll generate 41 recorded hits, one for themselves and 40 for all the assets on the page.
Hits don’t measure usability or quality of content.
To further build on our web knowledge, we should understand visits, of the two types out there, unique visits are most important to website measurement. A visit is when a person visits a website – which we’ll call a session. This will generate a unique visit, yet if that same person returns for a new session, he will generate a visit, but not a unique one.
Website statistics aren’t an exact science. We asked Chris Joyce, our IT supervisor with over 12 years experience in the IT field.
‘Web stats are different depending on the platform or tool used, while web logs are said to be the most accurate, they don’t measure cached visits. Google is solid since its purchase of Urchin in 2005 and the subsequent release of its analytics tools but they are based on a generation from java code, so they rack up a different style of results. If you looked on Alexa.com or Statbrain.com you’d see discrepancies all round – who is the most accurate? Take a stab in the middle. The only true method is to force users to log into a website on each visit, but we prefer not to put visitors through this inconvenience.’
We are happy to have the opportunity to point out how accurate our statistics are and that our credibility is in tact.
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