Category Archives: Miscellaneous

Before You Sponsor Any Blog … Get the Facts!

Continuing my recent post on Making Sense of Web Stats, before you sponsor any blog, including this one, you should get the facts … and do your own research. While they don’t capture all of the traffic, or even every site, used in conjunction, the free traffic ranking sites of Ranking, Traffic Estimate, Compete, Quantcast, and, most importantly, Alexa are usually directionally accurate and are a good place to start. For example, if you were to check up on the major blogs in the space on August 15, 2009, you’d find:

Blog Alexa
Rank		 Traffic Estimate
Visits		 QuantCast
Visitors		 Compete
Visitors (US)		 Ranking
Rank
Spend Matters 317,868 47,000 12,000 7,760 188,166
Sourcing Innovation 324,279 47,200 4,400 — 159,761
Supply Chain Matters ???,??? ??,??? ?,??? ?,??? ?,???,???
(AG) Metal Miner 573,991 25,200 — — 924,425
Supply Excellence 960,349 10,700 — 1,767 217,056
Procure Insights 1,546,610 — 2,000 — —
Purchasing Certification Blog 3,080,943 — — 370 —
e-Sourcing Forum 3,108,516 — 2,300 — 873,926

This says that Sourcing Innovation, which briefly held the top spot on Alexa from June 10, 2009 to August 15, 2009 (and still holds the top spot on Traffic Estimate and Ranking), is currently ranked as the second most trafficed niche blog in the supply and spend management space. Not bad for an Upstart Blog that’s only three years old.

Furthermore, since you are also concerned about how much new traffic a site will attract, as new traffic is key to continued growth, the site’s ranking with respect to relevant searches is also important. For an overview of how each blog ranks, I refer you to the Google Rankings of the Sourcing Blogs of June 19, which is summarized below for a corpus of 99 relevant search terms:

Blog Top 10 Top 20 Top 30 Top 50 Top 100
Sourcing Innovation 8 10 13 17 23
Supply Excellence 4 4 7 10 15
Spend Matters 2 4 5 7 10
e-Sourcing Forum 2 4 5 7 10

This is one of the reasons why, from a new traffic acquisition perspective, Sourcing Innovation, which continues to grow anywhere from 3% to 30% month-over-month, is one of the top two blogs, and why, one day after the blog’s three year anniversary when Sourcing Innovation claimed the Top Supply Management and Spend Management blog ranking on Alexa, Sourcing Innovation has, in the past year, at least temporarily, ranked #1 on all five of the major traffic ranking engines.

Now that you’ve informed yourself, you can make the right choice. For more information on SI sponsorships, see the Open Pricing Model. (For more information on other blog sponsorships, if available, contact the respective blog owners.)

Making Sense of Web Stats: Hits, Page Views, Sessions, Unique Visits, and Unique IPs

What’s the most popular site? Is the most popular site the highest-ranked in Alexa? (Not likely.) The site that lists first in the search engine? (Not necessarily.)

Unless you have the traffic logs, and you know how to read them, you’ll never know.

This post attempts to explain the difference between the different types of web statistics out there. It’s important to understand which statistics, and which combination of them, are most relevant, and which statistics are least relevant. More importantly, it’s useful to know when a site is overestimating its audience (which is easy to do if the site’s owner doesn’t know how to configure or convey those stats correctly).

  • Hits

    Simultaneously the most popular statistic and the most misleading, a hit counter tracks every URL load, including accesses from spiders, bots, and reloads in a session. Depending on how your logs and/or statistics software is configured, it might even count every load of every css file, script, and image referenced by, and included in, the page. If it does, that could (falsely) give you a 10 for 1 reading on every site access. Although hits are a great gauge of bandwidth utilization, they are a very poor indicator of site popularity (especially if the site is the target of an overactive bot, a DOS attack, or a small group of loyal followers who like to reload it dozens of times a day to take part in chatter or gossip).

  • Page Views

    Probably the second most popular statistic. If used properly, this will represent the total number of times a page was (re)loaded from the site. It’s a better statistic than hits because, when used properly, references and includes are not counted and spider traffic is partially excluded as well. However, like hits, it can significantly overestimate the unique traffic experienced by a site.

  • Entry Views

    Used mainly with blogs, this counts the number of specific post accesses, as opposed to the number of times the main page was accessed.

  • Sessions

    One of the less popular statistics, and used mainly with portal and commerce sites that require login, it refers to the number of unique accesses of a site by a unique user identifier. It’s equal to the average number of unique visits times the number of unique visitors, and it’s a better indicator of site popularity than page views for a site whose visitors, on average, don’t visit more than a few times during the spanned time period.

  • Unique Visits

    Similar to sessions, except it refers to the number of unique accesses by IP. The difference is that if multiple visitors from the same IP access the site in the same time window (through a proxy server), the number of unique visitors could be under-represented.

  • Unique IPs

    Counts the number of unique IP addresses that accessed the site, and acts as a lower bound on the site’s popularity (since multiple individuals could access the site through the same IP address).

  • Combination of Page Views and Unique IPs

    Combined, one of the best, measures of a site’s popularity. You know the site has at least as many unique visitors as IPs and you know, based on the page views, about how many pages a unique visitor accesses in a given time period.

  • Combination of Unique Sessions/Visits and Unique IPs

    Combined, the other best measure of a site’s popularity. You know the site has at least as many unique visitors as IPs and you know, based on the sessions, about how many times a unique visitor visits the site.

So what are SI’s statistics? Over the past month:

Hits 149,030
Page Views 49,910
Entry Views 17,705
Visits 24,855
IPs *10,825

What does this mean? It means that at least 10,825 people visited SI last month, an average of 2.3 times each, visiting 4.6 pages each. Since about 34% of traffic is search engine traffic, which is mostly accesses of a page or two, we can exclude this traffic. Revising our statistics, we can then estimate that 7,145 people visited SI an average of 3.5 times each, visiting an average of 7 pages each. Furthermore, given that about 39% of traffic comes from external referrals (SI has over 10,000 incoming links from numerous sites all over the internet that link directly to it and redistribute its feeds), and that this traffic displays irregular patterns (and accesses SI approximately 50% as much as regular readers), we can estimate that, last month, there were:

  • 2925 regular readers who visited about 9.2 pages each in 4.2 visits
  • 4220 irregular readers who visited about 4.6 pages each in 2.1 visits
  • 3680 new readers who visited a page as a result of a search engine query

Finally, it is very important to justify the numbers. They must all be consistent. If the numbers don’t make sense, or if they are internally inconsistent, you are dealing with a site that really has no clue at all as to its traffic. The above numbers make very good sense since, while some readers will visit almost every day, my representative reader (who has no time to leave comments) is too busy to visit every day, but makes a point of visiting two (to three) times a week (often on Monday and Friday, which are the peaks of SI activity).

* Lower bound. This is one statistic I’m not able to retrieve by time period from the native blog stats tool, so it was extracted from one of the three third-party stats tools I also use, which rely on (java)scripts that can be cached or blocked, and therefore cause some hits/IPs to be missed.

Who Reads Sourcing Innovation?

Educated, informed, driven individuals like you … who care more about education, innovation, and self-improvement than the gossip of the day. You’re in good company. Last week, over a 5 day period, a sample of approximately 1,000 randomly-selected unique IPs were traced back to 888 unique organizations. Here are 88 random companies. As one smart and informed individual remarked, it’s a “who’s who of global sourcing“.

  • Aerospace Distributors
  • Alcan Aluminum Corp
  • Amazon.com
  • Ameriprise
  • Army & Air Force Exchange Service
  • AT&T
  • Bank of America
  • Bell Canada
  • Boeing
  • Canadian Tire
  • Caterpillar
  • Chevron
  • Cisco Systems
  • Computer Sciences Corporation
  • Continental Airlines
  • Cox Enterprises
  • Data General Corporation
  • Deere & Company
  • Defense Research Establishment (Canada)
  • Deutsche Post
  • Earnst & Young
  • Eaton Corporation
  • Emerson Electric
  • Ericsson
  • Fisher Scientific
  • Fox Entertainment Group
  • Fujitsu
  • General Electric
  • GlaxoSmithKline
  • Google
  • Harcourt General
  • HCL Technologies
  • Henry Ford Hospital
  • Hertz
  • Hewlett-Packard
  • Hitachi Credit America
  • Home Depot
  • Honda
  • Honeywell International
  • IBM
  • Intel Corporation
  • Johns Hopkins University
  • Johnson & Johnson
  • JP Morgan Chase & Co.
  • Kohler Company
  • KPMG
  • Kodak
  • Kroger
  • Loblaws Companies
  • Loyola University Chicago
  • MIT
  • Merck and Co.
  • Molson Coors
  • Motorola
  • NBC Universal
  • Nordstrom
  • Northrop Grumman
  • Oracle Corporation
  • Oxford Brookes University
  • Perseco North America
  • Pratt & Whitney Canada
  • Praxair
  • Raytheon Company
  • Research in Motion
  • Rhodes University
  • Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology
  • Samsung
  • SAP
  • SAS Airline
  • Schneider National
  • Shell
  • Siemens
  • Solar Turbines, Inc.
  • Sony
  • Staples
  • Sun Microsystems
  • Suncor
  • Tata
  • Texas A&M University
  • Time Warner Telecom
  • United Nations Office
  • United Parcel Service
  • University of California
  • Uponor
  • Virgin Media
  • Wachovia
  • Wal-Mart Stores
  • Whitepages.com

Like you, these readers are globally focused … and global. Even though about 95% of Sourcing Innovation’s readership, as you would expect, is from North America, Europe, and Asia, in that order (in a rougly 63%, 17%, 15% split), Australasia, South America, and Africa are also increasingly represented. In fact, the last month saw traffic from 168 countries.

SI’s readers are also numerous (and growing monthly). On an average day, around 1,000 of your intelligent and innovative peers will visit Sourcing Innovation, and in an average month, at leat 11,000 of your global counterparts will be here with you, collectively hitting the site about 150,000 times. (And, as I’ve pointed out before, that traffic is on par with many of the “leading” publications in the space, and was enough to secure Sourcing Innovation top blog on three of the five top external traffic ranking sites. See the archived posts, linked on the sidebar.)

I’ve seen some ridiculous claims on websites about readership levels, which is a shame, because it penalizes those of us who provide accurate data. For example, if a site that publishes new content daily claims to have a regular readership of 10,000, yet it only gets 20,000 hits a month, that says the “average” reader only visits the site 2 times a month, which makes no sense. Remember, the numbers have to add up and make sense. If they don’t, they’re just wrong.

I’ll outline in my next post about how to make sense of the confusing jumble of web statistics thrown at you. In Sourcing Innovation’s case, the “average” reader visits 2 to 3 times a week and accesses about 10 pages a month. Most accesses are home page accesses (which allows the reader to catch up on all the posts since their last access). This is about the regularity you’d expect from experienced and informed supply chain leaders who are too busy to spend a lot of time reading blogs, yet take the time to make Sourcing Innovation an integral part of their news, research, and continuing development efforts.

The McKinsey Quarterly’s Top Three Strategic Planning Tips for 2009

A recent article in The McKinsey Quarterly elucidated their three “top strategic planning tips” for 2009. In brief, they were:

  • Be realistic about scenario planning
    Recognize that several different futures are equally plausible, develop plans accordingly, and try to focus on the underlying drivers of the uncertainty.
  • Intensify Monitoring
    That’s the only way you’ll be able to detect which way the marketing is shifting and bring the appropriate plan to bear. And be sure to carefully monitor suppliers and competitors as well as customers. A single supplier bankruptcy could derail all of your plans.
  • Look Beyond the Crisis
    Regardless of how devastating the downturn may be, it cannot hold back fundamental market trends forever — such as the aging customer base in Europe and North America and the fact that every downturn must eventually stabilize and give way to an upturn on the market sine wave.
    Besides, if you can’t see beyond the crisis, how can you possibly expect to get out of it? So identify your post-downturn market, start marketing to it, and ramp up R&D to make sure you have the products ready that your market wants when it’s ready to buy them.