Advertisers, when you're looking to an R/C site to run a marketing campaign, be it a simple banner ad placement, a forum sponsorship, or a product giveaway, you want to get a fair and accurate assessment of how popular the site is and how many people your campaign has the potential to connect with. Site admins can give you traffic figures and back them up with screen captures of their server stats pages, but these cannot always be trusted at face value. There are a number of factors that can make these figures nearly as unreliable and imprecise as random guesses. Let's see why.
Hits
Smaller sites will often put great emphasis on a number called "hits." "Hits" is a value in web server statistics that reports on the number of times any file of any sort has been accessed, anywhere on a site. This includes all images (even those you cannot see), JavaScript files, stylesheet files, and inline frames ("IFRAMEs"). A visit to a single page on a modern site can easily generate 15-30 "hits," one for the actual page itself, and the rest for files that are referenced in the rendering of that page. Additionally, remote loading of graphics such as "topsites" buttons (which also artificially inflate Unique Visits), smilies, and banner and forum signature images referenced from other sites, score "hits" towards the site that created and hosts the image, not the site that displays it.
You can easily see why "hits" is an entirely invalid statistic. It is a heavily inflated number and if you don't know the technical details of web server reporting systems it's easy to assume that a "hit" refers to a view of a page (properly called a "page view") or some other meaningful gauge of traffic. Actual page views on an example site have been seen to be more than 98% lower than "hits." The URC Network monthly "hits" figure is an 8-digit number, while our actual number of page views is a 6- or 7-digit number.
Page Views
Unfortunately, there's often still less than meets the eye with even "page view" statistics, themselves. A single visit to a single modern web page can easily generate 2-5 "page views," as there are embedded pages and other scripts that count towards the total "page views" for the session. Honest reporting requires careful analysis of URL-specific statistics and the removal of artificial influences.
Beware the site that baits you with an inflated page view stat and but is unable to deliver the unique ad views that you'd expect to follow.
"Who's Online" and Popularity Statistics
Most R/C forums include a dynamically-updated "Most users ever online" statistic on their main page. This value is almost always misleading, on any forum, as it includes "spiders," also known as "robots" or "crawlers," non-human, automated visitors digitally "reading" pages to gather keywords and contextual information for inclusion in search engines or large web directories. In my experience, the number is generally 25-50% over-inflated due to these "spider" visits.
Even after parsing out the spiders, though, you're not in the clear. On the overwhelming majority of forums today, the "Currently active users" or "Who's Online Now" statistic is an estimate, not an actual measure of the number of people actively browsing or reading the site at that instant. Specifically, the value shows how many people have clicked any active page link within the past n minutes, where n is a number set by the site admin.
Consider an example. Sixty (60) people visit at equal intervals over the course of 2 hours, each spending 10 minutes on the site. A maximum of 5 visitors will be concurrently browsing at any given moment. With the aforementioned "n" value defaulted to between 15 & 30 minutes, most sites will report anywhere from 12-20 simultaneous visitors. One site has been seen counting users as "currently active" up to a full two hours after they had left the site. It would report all 60 users in our example as being "currently active" at the end of the two-hour period, over-exaggerating its popularity by a factor of 3x to 5x over competitors with standard forum settings. Another popular site counts users as being active for over 17 hours after they leave the site.
(The Ultimate R/C Network forums software has been modified to not use the misleading phrase "Currently active users." We clearly indicate our 'n' value, showing "Users active in the past hour.")
Don't be duped by sites that manipulate settings to fraudulently inflate their stats to make it appear as if they are several times more popular than they actually are!
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