Calculating readership is a major advantage that websites have over print media or direct mail (yes, that card likely is pulled out of the mailbox, but you’ll never know if it’s read or tossed in the garbage.)
Every website can and should enable a feature called Google Analytics, which provides an objective and instantaneous measure of how many people are reading it and where they are located. Google Analytics also shows how many people are seeing your ad by date and time.
Ask any website you are considering advertising on for a “screenshot” of its Google Analytics data, showing the number of “unique” readers (the total number in the past 30 days.) Also ask for a Google Analytics screenshot showing the number of readers by location. There is one website that’s been in business in West Hollywood going on seven years whose publisher has actually bragged about his readership in China. Those Chinese readers, however, are unlikely to be shopping in your store.
Why a “screen shot”? That’s the only inexpensive way you can ensure that the information you’re getting is accurate (unfortunately all too many website publishers lie about their traffic.) WEHOville.com encourages local websites to use a system called QuantCast that provides other detailed information such as the age and gender of readers. To date, no other websites are using QuantCast, so you can’t use it yet to compare WEHOville.com with other sites.
To compare the popularity of websites, go to Alexa.com, a free service of Amazon. Alexa won’t tell you the actual number of readers of a website. But it will rank websites that you choose by their traffic. Unfortunately it only offers a national and a global ranking, so you can’t tell how the website performs in Los Angeles or Southern California. Nevertheless it’s a useful tool for seeing how websites you are considering compare with one another. If a website has no global traffic ranking, it’s generally assumed that next to no one is reading it.
I like this alot, will look into it. I didn’t see a price mentioned for using it but it would be nice to know if people read your website and if not then revamping it. By reading your website didn’t mean yours I read yours daily. Wehoville has become a favorite tool for finding not only local artictles but interesting events going on that would have never known about.
Thanks for the information, It is very interesting and useful for many people.