The purpose of the UK Recruiter discussion board
is to give recruiters the opportunity to discuss issues relating to their jobs
and the recruitment industry in the UK.
Whilst providers of goods and services to the
industry are welcome to partake in the discussions they should not use this
forum for advertising.
Please read and adhere to the board's guidelines which you will see when you click to "start new topic"
|
| Reply To This Thread |
| Re: Reliability of Hitwise Stats |
| Author: | Jim |
| Date: | Monday, 9th Oct 2006 16:16 |
| Views: | 407 (excluding Digests and RSS feeds) |
| Category: | Standards and Reputation | | URL: | http://web.ukrecruiter.co.uk/forum/Forum/read.php?i=4422 |
|
|
I must admit, as a former job board owner, i used to find Hitwise data very surprising and it often ranked other sites which i knew had less traffic and certainly much inferior se rankings higher than my site. The geographical source of the traffic was also a mystery. |
|
| Reply To This Thread |
| Re: Reliability of Hitwise Stats |
| Author: | JC |
| Date: | Monday, 9th Oct 2006 16:39 |
| Views: | 356 (excluding Digests and RSS feeds) |
| Category: | Standards and Reputation | | URL: | http://web.ukrecruiter.co.uk/forum/Forum/read.php?i=4422 |
|
Hi Helen,
Hitwise stats can be manipulated as you state by cross referencing files across different servers / websites to artificially boost visitor numbers.
This was covered here a while back by certain sites.
I think it was friendsreunitedjobs doing it big style first off. They went in at position 3 or something in hitwise outperforming the likes of monster until someone complained and hitwise addressed the issue.
All the publishers are guilty of the same techniques anyway, they like to give the impression that they are whiter than white but the reality is that they will do what ever is necessary to look like they are market leading and if that means ripping off other other sites ideas they will do that also, so be carefull if you are in the design business, might be a good idea to block the ips of the main publisher sites!.
I guess you are not going to get a clear metric in this market very easily. abc is perhaps the closest you are likely to get and perhaps the best available because they cross check it to the sites own stats but that can also be manipulated by sites buying in loads of traffic during the month of audit!, so i dont know what the answer is to be honest.
As for Hitwise imo its just expensive glorified spywhere, it lets the bigger publishers who subscribe to it know where other sites get their traffic and what keywords to optimise or pay per click for to try and stay ahead but frankly the publishers need all the help they can get!! and i dont like that kind of thing anyway - it just feeds big pockets the answers without them having to do the spade work!
On a personal level i dont think hitwise is worth the subscription in terms of value for money as its not that accurate and can be manipulated but others may disagree.
Thats my take on it anyway |
|
| Reply To This Thread |
| Re: Reliability of Hitwise Stats |
| Author: | Tony Restell (Top-Consultant.com) |
| Date: | Tuesday, 10th Oct 2006 10:54 |
| Views: | 379 (excluding Digests and RSS feeds) |
| Category: | Standards and Reputation | | URL: | http://web.ukrecruiter.co.uk/forum/Forum/read.php?i=4422 |
|
Quite apart from the "manipulation" that has been written about above, the other issue that mustn't be overlooked is the reliability of the data from the point of view of the sample that is used to produce the statistics.
Both Hitwise and Alexa rankings are based on tracking the web surfing patterns of a small minority of web users. As such, any conclusions that site X has more traffic than site Y have to be treated with caution.
We ourselves swapped data with another website who were perplexed to see themselves appearing higher than us on web monitoring sites like Alexa and Hitwise. At the time we both used the same web traffic monitoring provider to monitor our own site stats, so our internal figures were directly comparable - and they showed that we were quite a lot bigger than the other site, rather than smaller as the figures had suggested.
Why did this happen?
With Alexa the issue came down to toolbars. We offer candidates a Top-Consultant.com toolbar, which drives a lot of repeat traffic to our site. However, if you have our toolbar installed you can't be running the Alexa toolbar - so in other words, the very action we'd taken to increase site traffic had the effect of reducing our score on Alexa.
Equally with Hitwise the problem was down to the sample. Our readers predominantly visit our site from their work PCs, ie. from the office. But Hitwise monitors data from major ISPs, ie. data about people's surfing patterns from their home computers (or small business premises). So once again a strategy that could be good for a jobs board - increasing the number of people that use the site from major blue-chips during office hours - fails to translate into an improved Hitwise score.
I share this with you just as an example of the limitations of these types of data sources. They are VERY useful for checking on new jobs boards that claim to have huge traffic. There was a new jobs board launched that made outrageous claims (already discussed on this site) during the last 12 months - and a quick look at either Alexa or Hitwise would have shown these claims to be bogus. So for vetting jobs boards you are considering using these stats can be valuable. And equally for competitor analysis they can shed interesting light. But specifically for the task of saying is site X bigger than site Y they must be treated with caution.
Tony Restell
http://www.Top-Consultant.com |
|
| Reply To This Thread |
| Re: Reliability of Hitwise Stats |
| Author: | techrecruiter |
| Date: | Tuesday, 10th Oct 2006 10:57 |
| Views: | 381 (excluding Digests and RSS feeds) |
| Category: | Standards and Reputation | | URL: | http://web.ukrecruiter.co.uk/forum/Forum/read.php?i=4422 |
|
|
Hitwise gets its data at ISP level as so i find in very hard to understand how the data could be wrong. We use hitwise to monitor our sites along with others and the data is always in line with our own tracking software and ABC;e audits. Unless you have used the software or know how this works then i can not understand how you can make such comments. |
|
| Reply To This Thread |
| Re: Reliability of Hitwise Stats |
| Author: | Tony Restell (Top-Consultant.com) |
| Date: | Tuesday, 10th Oct 2006 13:06 |
| Views: | 372 (excluding Digests and RSS feeds) |
| Category: | Standards and Reputation | | URL: | http://web.ukrecruiter.co.uk/forum/Forum/read.php?i=4422 |
|
Techrecruiter - not sure if that comment was in response to my post or to someone else's? But I have used hitwise data myself and have also had a meeting with Hitwise at which they admitted the shortcomings of their system quite openly. In our specific circumstances, many of our site visitors are consultants at Accenture, IBM, Capgemini, etc. As the ISPs Hitwise monitor don't cover the activity of employees at these types of firms the stats that emerge can be quite misleading if applied to our site. The same would be true of many other sites.
So I'm sure the stats Hitwise collect are totally accurate for the subset of web users that they monitor. But by their own admission to me, the data is only a sample and so care has to be exercised when assuming the data is then representative of the whole spectrum of internet users.
Tony Restell
http://www.Top-Consultant.com |
|
| Reply To This Thread |
| Re: Reliability of Hitwise Stats |
| Author: | MR |
| Date: | Tuesday, 10th Oct 2006 14:30 |
| Views: | 430 (excluding Digests and RSS feeds) |
| Category: | Standards and Reputation | | URL: | http://web.ukrecruiter.co.uk/forum/Forum/read.php?i=4422 |
|
|
This posting was forwarded to me by our web developers as we are currently having issues with hitwise stats being publicised by our competitors as a means to effecitively "denigrate" our job board. The lack of information on the reports as to how they calculate their stats does put us at a distinct disadvantage where potential clients are concerned - many companies just look at stats and go for the site with the most hits etc, as we are a specialist site I think it's important to show information on how the site is marketed - ie if there is a focus on particular search terms. It would be easy for us for example to use google adwords in order to increase our hit rate, however as we only want to target a particular sector massive hit rates are not necessarily a good thing. |
|
| Reply To This Thread |
| Re: Reliability of Hitwise Stats |
| Author: | Steve Bailey |
| Date: | Tuesday, 10th Oct 2006 17:20 |
| Views: | 380 (excluding Digests and RSS feeds) |
| Category: | Standards and Reputation | | URL: | http://web.ukrecruiter.co.uk/forum/Forum/read.php?i=4422 |
|
As mentioned above Hitwise reports are quite inaccurate. They get data from ISP's who pass on the log files to hitwise. Most of these ISP's are focussed on home-broadband. Hitwise does not get data from business ISP's. Most users of job boards are surfing during office hours.....
Furthermore as a web developer, techniques can be employed which will provide an artificial boost to figures.
Funny that certain new sites launched go to the top of the hitwise league in a really short space of time...... |
|
| Reply To This Thread |
| Re: Reliability of Hitwise Stats |
| Author: | have we now woken up? |
| Date: | Tuesday, 10th Oct 2006 21:46 |
| Views: | 359 (excluding Digests and RSS feeds) |
| Category: | Standards and Reputation | | URL: | http://web.ukrecruiter.co.uk/forum/Forum/read.php?i=4422 |
|
Do we all agree that the major job boards have been stringing us along for to many years with exagerated claims. Iffy rating systems and high prices?...
If so hooray!... and welcome back to the real nitty gritty of recruitment.
search your own database call your own leads and stop looking for an easy option of post and place.
Ta Ta
old rich old fart of traditional recruitment..xx
|
|
| Reply To This Thread |
| Re: Reliability of Hitwise Stats |
| Author: | John Durrant |
| Date: | Wednesday, 11th Oct 2006 09:52 |
| Views: | 365 (excluding Digests and RSS feeds) |
| Category: | Standards and Reputation | | URL: | http://web.ukrecruiter.co.uk/forum/Forum/read.php?i=4422 |
|
Hitwise stats should certainly be taken with a pinch of salt. They are only slightly better than Alexa which is a complete waste of time.
What is more important than 'hits' is the number of and quality of candidates a job board has and what type of response they generate for their clients. Number of applications per job etc.
I use a number of job boards to post jobs and was sucked in initially by the wild claims made by some of them. I find now the best results are often from those which don't appear to be the busiest as far as Hitwise is concerned.
What really suprises me is that I regularly get emails / press releases from new sites which have just sprung up claiming they now occupy 50% of the market share etc despite only being online for a month of two. Crazy!
The sites that have been around for a few years are the ones to be trusted. |
|
| Reply To This Thread |
| Re: Reliability of Hitwise Stats |
| Author: | Gavin West |
| Date: | Friday, 3rd Nov 2006 19:00 |
| Views: | 318 (excluding Digests and RSS feeds) |
| Category: | Standards and Reputation | | URL: | http://web.ukrecruiter.co.uk/forum/Forum/read.php?i=4422 |
|
|
Yes, most of the comments above are correct. Hitwise can certainly give a rather inaccurate picture as to the market leading websites in any particular sector. It's so easy for Hitwise to build a distorted graph to suit the agenda of their clients. Hitwise data sources are very unreliable and can be manipulated by web developers. The only reliable way to benchmark is to search on Google to see where these sites appear when you search for phrases specific to your industry, if they are not appearing its unlikely they'll have the visitor numbers. Also ABC Electronic provides the most reliable way to determine a sites visitor numbers. |
|
| Reply To This Thread |
| Re: Reliability of Hitwise Stats |
| Author: | JimmyC |
| Date: | Monday, 6th Nov 2006 11:19 |
| Views: | 741 (excluding Digests and RSS feeds) |
| Category: | Standards and Reputation | | URL: | http://web.ukrecruiter.co.uk/forum/Forum/read.php?i=4422 |
|
|
I have read with interest peoples comments regarding the accuracy of Hitwise stats...in light of these can anyone suggest a better product for benchmarking recruitment websites/job bords? |
|
| Reply To This Thread |
| Re: Reliability of Hitwise Stats |
| Author: | DomSumners |
| Date: | Monday, 6th Nov 2006 11:44 |
| Views: | 399 (excluding Digests and RSS feeds) |
| Category: | Standards and Reputation | | URL: | http://web.ukrecruiter.co.uk/forum/Forum/read.php?i=4422 |
|
There is no one product for benchmarking job sites/boards and my experience of media old and new suggests that there never will be, so the objective criteria you can use to judge are:
- ABCe Audit - objective snapshot of numbers of unique users
- Noras - profile of a sites audience
- HItwise (see above for problems with this)
- Response Audits - sites are beginning to offer response per job stats
- Search Engine performance - how site performs in natural and indeed paid for search returns
- Own site stats - unaudited info from site owner - some of these i trust - many i dont
- Current client base (who's paying for the servce already)
- Testimonials/Experience/Client feedback
- take expert advice (sorry, but...)
Not exhaustive but hopefully useful
Dom Sumners
MD
OnlineMediaExperts |
|
| Reply To This Thread |
| Re: Reliability of Hitwise Stats |
| Author: | Andrew Gordon |
| Date: | Friday, 10th Nov 2006 17:09 |
| Views: | 365 (excluding Digests and RSS feeds) |
| Category: | Standards and Reputation | | URL: | http://web.ukrecruiter.co.uk/forum/Forum/read.php?i=4422 |
|
Hi
As Louise said in her recent newsletter, the topic of user figures and website activity is a topic for constant debate.
With regard to Hitwise, we've certainly puzzled over its rankings on more than one occasion.
Sometimes we've appeared in their Top 10 list when our own log files show no major increase in traffic. Often the reverse is true, we *think* we've had a good week but then don't appear at all in the Hitwise list?!
It gets to a point where you take any figures - even your own - with a pinch of salt. Especially when you read articles such as this:
http://tinyurl.com/y4wg6l
(Redirected via TinyUrl so as not to break the URL)
Andrew
=======
Andrew Gordon
Director
www.jobs.ac.uk
|
|
| Reply To This Thread |
Please note: The reply form is not showing because the posting is older than six months or the thread is locked. Please start a new topic or contact the forum administrator.
|
| -->
|
|
