Eamonn Fitzgerald's Rainy Day

ONE of the most tiresome of clichés is "You never get a second chance to make a first impression." And seeing that the word "impression" has lent itself to cliché, nothing good can come of it, which brings us, somehow, to the devalued internet currency known as the "page impression" (sometimes called "page view"). You see, it's been an awful month for page impressions. If you think the dollar is in decline, you should take a look at PIs, as insiders call them. Sell! Sell! Sell! That's the message.

WHERE to begin? Well, Monday is good as the week began with the New York Times leading off with a Technology piece called "In Web Traffic Tallies, Intruders Can Say You Visited Them". This was about a scam that used pop-up windows to spawn "content", with the result that the crooks behind the operation were using this "traffic" to bloat their website statistics for the purpose of swindling advertisers.

ONE of the companies named in the article, Zango, blamed "third-party affiliates" for the problems and its chief executive, Keith Smith, when asked about the business of inflating traffic numbers, delivered one of the worst sentences of the year: "The measurement piece is still evolving," he said. No creationist, Keith Smith. A confirmed believed in evolution, he.

IN the early days of the web, the "hit" was touted as the be-all and end-all net metric, but when it became apparent that sites were filling pages with image files and that every time a browser requested one from the server this was counted as a "hit", the rubbish metric was consigned to the rubbish bin. Exit the counting of each file and enter the counting of each page, aka "page impression". And now exit the page impression because the Audit Bureau Circulation Electronic, the independent body that measures traffic to UK websites, has announced that from 1 January it will change its standard measurement method from page impressions to unique users. You see, page impressions are useless for counting the number of people who visit your website. If you have 10,000 page impressions there is no way of knowing whether the site has 10 readers clicking on a 1,000 pages, or 1,000 readers clicking on 10 pages. And then there's the quality question. If you have lots of page impressions it could mean that your site is badly designed and people have to click around a lot to find the page they're looking for.

ANOTHER nail in the coffin of the PI is that the next generation of web sites, built with Ajax and Flash, will allow the user to do everything within a single page — like here. Because this eliminates the need to click from one page to another, the notion of page impression is history.

UNIQUE users, who can be tracked with registration, cookies or the addresses of the computers they use, offer a more accurate picture. But, and this is the thing with the mercurial web, the "unique" metric is less than fully accurate because people can delete cookies and 1,000 people can surf from one IP address (the series of numbers given to your computer when you log on to the net) or companies can offer dynamic IP addresses. Meaning that if you log in 10 times a day and visit the Rainy Day each time, you'll be counted as 10 different users with different IP addresses.

STILL, compared to the hit and the PI, the "unique" metric is the one that gives the best, er, impression of what's happening on your site. For now.