TALLYING OF UNIQUE VISITORS BRINGS QUESTIONS
For what it’s worth, below is what nine major DE portal
sites reported to Educational Pathways as the monthly
average total of unique visitors who visit their Web sites.
When we saw a huge disparity between what Peterson’s
Distance Learning portal (a fairly recognizable brand)
reported to us and what the others reported, we asked
Peterson’s Vice President of Marketing Michael Fleischner
why the Peterson’s figure seemed so low.Fleischner
believes that there is a lot of misinformation reported when
it comes to tallying Web traffic figures. Number one, he
says that Peterson’s has extensively researched how many
students, in general, take distance learning programs every
year. He claims that if you were to add up several of the
largest figures reported by many of the portal sites, for
instance, you would come up with "more potential students
than exist on the face of the Earth."
Secondly, he believes that the way such statistics are
tracked could be misleading because some sites may have
multiple servers containing a variety of sub-sections or
channels that exist within one Web site. As a visitor goes
from one server to the next, they are tallied as a unique
visitor each time, resulting in one visitor being tallied
multiple times.
One way in which you might attempt to get a handle on how
many people visit any given Web site is to check out
www.alexa.com,
an Amazon.com company that computes traffic rankings by
analyzing the Web usage of millions of Alexa Toolbar users.
According to the Alexa.com Web site, "the information is
sorted, sifted, anonymized, counted and computed, until,
finally, we get traffic rankings shown in the Alexa
service." However, this traffic data are based on the set of
Alexa user, "which may not be a representative sample of the
global Internet population."
Incidentally, the top three distance learning directories
listed by Alexa.com at the time of this writing were
lifelonglearning.com,
which is the main entry to Peterson’s;
www.worldwidelearn.com;
and Yahoo Distance Learning at
http://distancelearning.education.yahoo.com
# of unique
visitors per month as reported by each portal (no
independent verification):
www.onlineuc.net -
20,000 (young Web site launched in May 2003)
www.petersons.com/distancelearning
- 28,760
www.distancegradschools.com - 65,000
www.degreeinfo.com -
93,000
distancelearn.about.com -
112,700
www.ed-x.com - 120,000
www.worldwidelearn.com -
185,700
www.elearners.com -
270,000
www.classesusa.com-
500,000 |
